The Long Night Before the Morning After

Lent, like Advent, is a season of waiting. Unlike Advent, Lent feels heavy. We know that Easter Sunday is coming - but the only way to get there is through Good Friday. Through death. Through weeping. Through grief. Through fear and disillusionment.

I bet Mary, Jesus’ mother, wanted to skip Friday. Even after Sunday, what had happened on Friday was still imprinted in her mind. She had been there when her son was cruelly and publicly murdered. She had seen his feet pierced - the very same feet she had kissed at his birth. I wonder how Easter morning felt for her. Was she relieved? Did she feel joy? Or was she incredulous that God had let Friday even happen? I imagine her feelings were mixed - joy and grief wrapped up together.

Lent feels heavy because its path goes through grief. Grief that we have to pass through in preparation for Easter morning. Grief of a mother’s loss of her first son. Even Jesus’ own grief that we hear in his cry of abandonment on that cross. 

Lent feels heavy because it touches on our own grief.

I know grief. The kind of deep, black, heavy grief that shrouds life and from which you wonder if you will ever rise. The kind of grief that pulls you down into an isolated tomb where the rock hasn’t been rolled away. The kind of grief that causes you to pour out tears so long and so hard that you wonder how you haven’t drowned in them. The kind of grief you look back on and wonder how you are even still alive. The kind of grief that never really goes away - even when the life days come. 

When Jesus was on the verge of death, he cried out using words from Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Once we get to Easter we talk about how even in his forsakenness Jesus was close enough to God to cry out like this, close enough to God to pray. But right now we are still in Lent, still facing Friday’s events to come. Let us sit with Jesus as he cries out these words, feeling deep in our bones that Jesus knows the depths of grief. That we are not alone in ours. 

The morning after

the Son rose and supposedly

vanquished death for always

feels suspiciously like the previous morning

and what I imagine all the mornings

to come will feel like.

Will the next morning after and the

one after that still feel like the grave

where no one has remembered to roll

back the stone?

Will the grave cloths wrap too tightly

around our faces,

pressing shame, and loss, and fear

over us,

extinguishing us,

holding us down?

Will we dig our way out,

dirt and grit under our fingernails

reminding us of the lies and hurts and losses,

the little death stings

that buried us in the first place?

I wonder what resurrection feels like to those

already in the graves,

to those who are already dirt?

What is their morning after?

Who will roll back their stones?

Will the children dancing on the grass outside

call them forth from their fears

and into a morning after they can't imagine?

What does it mean to live again when the

grave cloths won't let go,

when the mornings after seem unimaginable,

when our fingertips can't reach the light?

The Son has risen

and we can only trust that the rays of a new morning,

the morning after our next morning,

will roll back our stones.

That this resurrected love vanquishes even death,

and grave cloths,

and all that put us behind those stones.

Blessings,

Pastor Amy