by Jill Lin
It is often tempting to skip straight to Easter, isn’t it? Easter is filled with springtime promise, beautiful dresses, flowers, light, praise, joy! After all, it’s about life! Resurrection! In the US it is common enough to even have Easter egg hunts the week before Easter. Yet that’s not the path of Holy Week. You see, there is no Resurrection without a death preceding it. And joy runs deeper than Easter fun.
This year, the public Easter egg hunts are all off. The cherry blossoms bloom, but the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler is cancelled. No-one is out browsing stores for new Sunday dresses or pretty sandals. There will be no Easter parade. There will be no congregation present at an Easter service!
This year, it feels more like Holy Week than ever. More like Maundy Thursday and Good Friday than like Easter Sunday.
Isolated. Afraid. Betrayed. Death. Uncertainty. Pain. Hiding in an upper room. Scared death might come for us next.
These experiences and feelings are all around us.
Jesus died for us. It’s something we hear so often and we tell it as “good news”. As I sit here this Good Friday, I recall how as a child I asked my grandmother as we walked down her street one day, arms linked together, why on earth we call it “good” as Jesus died! This seemed a pretty bad event. And by all accounts, there is no such thing as a good crucifixion. It is one of the most painful ways to execute a man. She told me His death was horrible for Him, but it was good for us.
Jesus died for our salvation. That is something you can grow up hearing in the church so often that it becomes a rote statement of faith. Yes, he died so that we can live. Yes, he died so that there is nothing barring us from entry to Heaven nor from the love of God. And then He rose up from the tomb!
But before we jump too quickly to songs of Resurrection, as we walk now in a world that seems to reflect Good Friday more than Easter Sunday, what strength and hope can we draw from Calvary itself?
In many ways, the Crucifixion, the Passion, is the ultimate moment of the Incarnation. Yes, that is a word we usually use more often around Christmas, when we think of a cuddly baby rather than a bloodied corpse. Yet there is nothing more human in a fallen world than facing death. And in this global moment of a pandemic, we are all contemplating death more often than we usually do in our modern world. Friday tells us that Jesus endured a painful death. A lonely death. An unjust death. And in that, I see the ultimate acceptance of being incarnate in a fallen world. He took our sins on Him. And as He did so, He also endured the results of our sin. God understands. Not just the mundane everyday things of existence, though that is also no small thing! But He understands the worst experiences of being human.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, right before He was betrayed, he was afraid. He wanted another way. To be sure, He chose the Father’s Will. To be sure, He knew Resurrection waited at the other side. To be sure, He did it for the joy of reconciling us with the Father, for the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12:2). Yet, in that moment, when it was all about to unfold, God the Son was still afraid, troubled, sorrowed, distressed:
He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them.
Mark 14: 33-34a
This tells me, it’s ok to feel afraid. It’s okay to be so afraid you cry to the point of sweating blood. It’s ok. You are not weak because you are afraid. Perhaps right now you are afraid to go to work and be exposed to the coronavirus. Perhaps you are afraid for elderly relatives or symptomatic friends. Perhaps you are afraid you’ll lose your job or you’ve lost your job and are afraid for future provision. Gethsamane tells me it is possible to have faith and feel afraid. Fear is not weakness, nor does it equate to lack of faith. We have a God who understands exactly how fear feels. It is a very human emotion, and is one that an incarnate God empathizes with fully.
And in His fear, sorrow and trial, He was alone.
Yes, He had taken three disciples with Him to pray, but they all fell asleep as He agonized! At His arrest, the disciples at first tried to rise up to defend Him, but when He insisted He choose to be arrested and prevented the disciples from armed defense, “everyone deserted him and fled” (Mark 14:50). As He faced His accusers, He stood alone, and even Peter, who had drawn close enough to be in His line of sight, denied any knowledge of Him, as Jesus had known he would. As He endured the mockery of the guards, the cruelty, the false trial and false witnesses, He did so alone. Even on the Cross, where the women and one disciple were close by, only He could endure His own pain. And only He could endure the turning away of His Father. In this season where many are staying home to obey “shelter in place” laws, for many this is leading to heartbreaking loneliness. It is so hard not to receive a hug, a handshake or just another human presence. It is so hard not to feel love and companionship present next to you! For those in ICU care, there is the terrible loneliness of suffering without family or friends even allowed to be present, and their families likewise suffering waiting at home! For others, there is the much greater, painful loneliness that comes from the grief of losing a loved one. In His arrest, trial and crucifixion, we see Jesus face loneliness. He had to face great trials and suffering alone. Without the support of friends and loved ones…. Until the Cross, and even then, few came, the pain was His own alone, and the depth of His loneliness was in His cry “My God, My God, why forsaken me?” (Mark 16 34:b). In Calvary, we see that Jesus empathizes fully with being alone, even with suffering alone. In this time of COVID-19, take heart! Whether you are sheltering-in-place or alone in a hospital or alone in your grief, God understands. He has been alone through hardship, too. We see this throughout His Good Friday experience.
There is great empathy in the Crucifixion. The incarnate God shows Himself truly to be Immanuel, God with us. He endured with us.
And because of the Cross, we also have Hope!
The Crucifixion shows me that God understands the depths of human depravity and has endured the worst parts of this mortal life. He understands. He empathizes.
But He has also overcome!
Friday showed me that Jesus has paid the price. On Friday, Jesus died. On Friday, the curtain in the temple was torn from top to bottom. On Friday, the ransom was paid. On Friday, Jesus took a mortal blow and bore the weight of God’s anger at sin. Why did He do it? So that we never have to.
Perhaps the idea of an angry God doesn’t sound very hopeful. But we need a wrathful God. Why? Because we need a loving God. We need His loving anger. For the last thing, the very last thing, a suffering world would want is an apathetic God. We want a God who is angry at the injustice, pain, death, and suffering that has taken hold in His world. We want a God who looks at Evil and says “that is not right!” We want a God who sees us suffering in a pandemic and whose heart is broken when we grieve, when we suffer, when ignorance, politics, inequality and injustice exacerbate suffering. We don’t want God not to be angry. We want a God who sees sisters grieving their brother’s death, as He did when Lazarus died, and His response was to weep with them! We want the loving anger of a parent towards His children, who ignore him and consequently hurt themselves and each other. The trouble is that we all fail. We don’t like to fail, or to admit it, but we do. And so we also desperately need a God who forgives, and a God who accepts us, even with our frailties and weaknesses. We need a God who will welcome us, even after we sin. On Good Friday, we see that God is both. He loved us enough to be angry at sin. And He loved us enough both to bear the experience of a broken world and its cruelties and to pay for the consequences for that brokenness in His own body. God loves us. And therefore God died for us. Heaven’s gates were opened wide, as the old hymn says. Right in the midst of the pain of that Friday! Before the disciples even knew it. Before they could see it. Redemption had already taken place. Friday brought grief-stricken, fearful disciples, hiding in an upper room, terrified death would find them next. Yet before they even knew, while they were still in the midst of their pain and despair and fear, God’s plan for eternal hope had been accomplished!
Friday itself brought us hope.
Firstly, it gave us the hope that even in the midst of what seems terrible, frightening and grief-inducing, God can be at work creating something new. We are called to be open to hearing what that is. And if we can’t see it now, we can rest in the hope that “all things work together for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) This is not a trite Hallmark sentiment. It is the gritty reality of the work of a God who died an unjust death, a humiliating death, a painful, lonely death and became a bloodied corpse, buried under the cover of darkness. It is what was taking place even when it appeared that Friday that all hope was gone and there was nothing left to do but hide and grieve.
Secondly, Friday ensured that death is not the end, that punishment is not ours. As we face the fear of death all around us, Friday promises us that death is no longer to be feared. It is no longer the enemy. Redemption has been paid. God is just and God is loving. We are not stuck here in our Friday. Because He died, we can live. Because He died, Sunday came! Because of Friday, on Sunday our Resurrected Lord Jesus met those same, fearful disciples in the Upper Room, meeting them in their fear, in their hiding place, and showed them the Hope He had already achieved for them, with a promise for the future.
Because of Friday, Sunday came!
Without Friday, there is no Sunday!
And Sunday is still coming!
Coronavirus is not the end. Quarantine is not the end. Separation is not the end. Death itself is not the end. Thanks to Friday, none of those can any longer separate us from God and from eternity with Him.
…neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:38-39
The end is Resurrection! The end is new life! Just when we begin to wonder if the Angel of Death has won, we will find an empty tomb, our Resurrected Savior, and the promise of Hope, Joy and Eternal Life. In this Friday world that sometimes feels just too frightening these days, there is definitely hope within this world, thanks to a God who endures with us, who empathizes with us, and whose purposes are worked out even as circumstances bring us to our knees. He has not left us alone. He understands. But even more, He gives us Hope beyond this Friday moment, whether it lasts weeks or months. For if we truly understood what was accomplished at Calvary, we would no longer even fear death itself.
It’s a Friday world. But God did His greatest work on Friday!
And thanks to Friday, Sunday is coming!
Jill Lin
Jill is a stay-at-home mom with a passion for languages and history, loves attending a multicultural church and is a member of the DC chapter of CBE International. After growing up and studying in England, she moved to the US to marry her husband. She loves traveling, especially in Europe.