En route to the Easter bunny, the Easter parade and all the good news that modern Christians love, comes the hard part of the story: that their Savior Jesus, god and man, suffered agonizing torture and brutal death on a cross on what is called ambiguously Good Friday.

It’s been too painful and paradoxical a story even for some nominal Christians to credit. The prophet Muhammad’s Koran rewrote the story to suggest it was a double who died, and that the real Jesus got away.

For our times, the American Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, self-styled preacher in the public square, says the dark misery in Jesus real death and in the famous seven last words-berating his father, forgiving his enemies, anticipating paradise-are the crux of the whole story.

In a tradition that drew Bach, Beethoven, Becket, Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins to meditate on those last seven words, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is having a conversation with us on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, author of “Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross by Richard John Neuhaus.