The Gift the Crow Brings
A Post-Script Good Friday Homily
It is a frightening condition to have a hardened or calloused heart. As we read through these difficult texts today, the hardness of heart, which is more of a condition than a mere posture, is on full display. We see the hardness of heart when Jesus is struck across the face for daring to challenge the high priest. He is not unkind and he does not lie. He simply asks for truth. But truth is the one thing those hungry for power cannot bear to be confronted with so, without flinching, they slap the Son of God who is himself Truth, in the face. Judas, too, had a hard heart. He was unmoved by Jesus and was moved instead by the false and deadly promise of money, and so he betrayed his friend with a kiss of all things. The crowd, of course, had a hard heart and almost always does, for “the crowd is untruth,” as Kierkegaard writes.1 Pilate is caught up in the insanity of the moment. He asks the crowd what exactly they are accusing Jesus of. They basically say, ‘we wouldn’t have brought him here for no reason.’ Anyone with any sense knows that when those in power say “we have a reason,” there is never a reason, only a flex of the arm by those with hard hearts. And so Jesus is caught between religion and the empire, both of which are more than happy to use each other for their own purposes. So Pilate says,
“I find no case against him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” They shouted in reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a bandit.
And so the innocent is sentenced while the guilty is released not for the sake of mercy, but simply because no one cares about anything except what they want done, and they don’t even know what they are doing.
Even the disciples closest to Jesus had hearts that were hardened out of fear and disappointment. They would all desert him in his hour of greatest need. Jesus, throughout our entire narrative, doesn’t try and protect himself. He doesn’t use force, and he even heals the ear of Malchus after Peter cuts it off in an attempt to defend Jesus. And I wonder if that was a turning point for Peter? I wonder if in his own heart he thought, ‘This guy would rather heal the enemy’s slave than withhold his public rebuke of me.’ Did Peter’s heart enclose in this moment? Was that his breaking point, or rather, his un-breaking point — the point where his heart became like a stone?
The only moment that we see anything like a display of power coming from Jesus is when he asks the people, Judas included, who they are looking for. They say, “Jesus of Nazareth,” and Jesus replies, “I am he,” and with that all of the people with their lanterns and weapons fell to the ground. Apparently overcome by the event, the same thing happens again. Jesus says, “Who are you looking for?” and they reply, “Jesus of Nazareth,” and Jesus says,
“I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.”
“I did not lose a single one…”
But didn’t Jesus? It would seem to me that he lost them all since every single one of them betrayed him. But Jesus says clearly that he didn’t lose any.
And this is the strange truth in front of us on this Good Friday, that while every disciple was all to ready to lose Jesus, he was not ready to lose any of them. We are met both with the openness of God in Jesus, and the closed and hardened hearts of people as demonstrated by everyone else.
Abraham Heschel says these frightening words about hardness of heart:
The normal soul is fit and pliable, open to truth, sensitive to God. But...Sin has its cause in the hardness, stiffness, or the stubbornness of heart. To be callous is to be blind to the presence of God in the world, blind to “the glory of His majesty” (Isa. 2:21). Such blindness results in pride, haughtiness, and arrogance. Hardness of heart is a condition of which the person afflicted is unaware.2
Those afflicted aren’t aware they are afflicted, which is why Jesus cries out on the cross, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” They were literally doing the worst thing possible — killing the God who came to save them — but they were blind to the horror of it and blind to the glory of God in the face of Jesus.
As I contemplated our Gospel passages I was really struck this year by the astounding grace of the cock crowing and, while not in our reading today, Jesus telling Peter that he would deny him three times and then the cock would crow. Have you ever thought about that for more than a minute? Maybe Peter’s story would have been totally different if Jesus hadn’t mentioned the cock crowing being related to Peter’s denial. It would have been just an annoyance amidst his disappointment and simmering rage. But God spoke prophetically through that bird. The bird’s crow said:
‘He told you this would happen. Wasn’t he right? Weren’t you wrong?’
And the sound of this bird gave Peter the greatest gift he could possibly receive in that moment: a broken heart. In Psalm 51, the Psalmist famously writes, “a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise,” and Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk grabbed ahold of this truth and wrote something that seems like a great title for a country song, but also a truth so deep that we should tattoo it on all of our hearts, and that this: "nothing is as whole as a broken heart.” Jean-Luc Nancy goes so far as to say that,
“The heart does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart.”3
The crowd, the disciples, the religious leaders, the political leaders all had one thing in common: their hearts were unbroken. But when the cock crowed, Matthew’s Gospel tells us, Peter “wept bitterly.” But this is grace, sisters and brothers, for a heart that is broken is a heart that is broken open and is able again to receive what it could not when it was hardened.
Today is called Good Friday. Why is it good? Because perhaps these texts about what we did to the Son of God can, if we’re truly listening, break our hearts too, and therefore open them so that we can be in a place to receive love again and be saved in the breaking.
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon us. Break our hearts and break us open.
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Søren Kierkegaard, Armed Neutrality, (published posthumously 1880, written 1848), 108. Quoted in Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 267.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, Two Volumes in One (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Book 1, 191.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love,” in A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 264. Quoted in Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard's Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 172.
Thanks for this. This illustrates how the cock’s cry can become the axis of grace—the shattering note that names us. I can’t help but think of The Cloud of Unknowing, where the soul must leave behind all that it can grasp, even in thought, and plunge into that dark unknowing that is not absence, but the veiled brilliance of God’s presence. The hardened heart, after all, is not simply resistant—it is convinced that it knows. It cannot be taught, because it has built a fortress of certainties around its own need for control.
But when the cock crows, when the Word pierces not the ear but the heart, that illusion collapses. And in the silence that follows—gutted of all our clever defenses—we are brought at last to the border of the true: not knowledge, but mercy. Not mastery, but surrender.
This, perhaps, is the Resurrection already pressing in. Not the miracle as spectacle, but as invasion—the way light enters through the cracks of broken things. It is here, in the dust and failure and blindness, that the flame of incarnational mysticism burns most brightly. The Word was made flesh not to glorify flesh, but to bear it—wounded, weeping, misunderstood. And still, Christ does not lose even one.
The desert fathers would call this the holy wound. Blake might call it the moment when the “doors of perception” are cleansed. Either way, it is Good—not because it spares us sorrow, but because it transfigures it. The break is real. But the heart begins there.
Thanks Phil... Very well written and beautiful. I do love bird sounds, but maybe the Rooster is one that I least appreciate. It is too loud and boisterous.... but it sure is a wakeup call! The verse that comes to me after reading your words are from Paul's writings, "It the kindness of God that leads us to repentance..." Kindness too can be a sort of wakeup call.