My 7-month-old baby, smiling and cooing at the toy I held above him, was perfect. “What a waste of time,” I thought as I sat next to the metal exam table. Giggles bubbled out as his little legs kicked the empty air above him. Thinking about my grocery list, I impatiently asked the sonographer, “So, everything looks OK, right?”
“Well, we aren’t supposed to say. We just take the pictures. Doctors read them.”
“OK, but can we leave soon?”
Wiping the goo off Luke’s stomach, the sonographer smiled and walked out of the room. Gathering our things together to repack the diaper bag, I was stunned when two white coats wearing concerned expressions rushed into the room.
“It’s tempting to hopscotch right over the story of the crucifixion when we know 48 hours later we will be rejoicing.”
Just a few days prior, Luke and I had been at the pediatrician’s office for his routine checkup. Everything looked great. As our doctor was finishing up, she said: “Let me feel his stomach one more time. His liver feels a little long. That happens sometimes, but let’s have it checked out, just in case. I’m sure everything is fine.”
Now, here we were, and everything was not fine.
I gazed down at my baby, nestled in my arms, as the words I was hearing blurred my vision and made it difficult to concentrate.
“A baseball-sized tumor on his liver … surgery … hematology/oncology … we don’t know …”
Just a mere 24 hours earlier, I stood near a pew beaming as I watched our older son and the other children of the church walk down the aisle lifting their palm branches and waving chubby fingers excitedly at their parents. Preparing the way for the Lord.
Where was the Lord now?
It was Holy Week. Family members made their way to our Missouri community, meal chains were organized and surgery was scheduled. The Monday after we all dressed in our Easter best and sang Hallelujahs, our baby would be cut open and would undergo a six-hour surgery to remove this unwelcome mass growing in his tiny abdomen.
There was much to do in preparation, and people buzzed around me keeping me occupied and distracted. During my daily runs, my feet struck the concrete angrily, even as outwardly I appeared calm. Easter was just days away and with it all the hope of the resurrection. Or so I had been told.
As a child, I was taught about the crucifixion of Jesus but I don’t remember weighing it too heavily. Why would I when Easter followed two days after? I came across a children’s Bible not too long ago that summed up my experience well. I opened this Bible to the lovely story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. A turned page revealed an empty tomb. Wait, what? I flipped back again to ensure I hadn’t missed a page or that a page hadn’t been torn out. No. This children’s edition of the Bible skipped straight over the death of Jesus. I laughed at this Bible, mainly because its message on those two pages rings true for so many of us. It’s tempting to hopscotch right over the story of the crucifixion when we know 48 hours later we will be rejoicing.
“On this Good Friday, if … the hope of Easter seems galaxies away, I encourage you to sit in your pain, knowing that Jesus knows what it feels like to grieve, to be angry and to feel the chaos of life turned upside down.”
This season was different. I arrived at the church’s Good Friday service and robed in black. The scripture readings had been assigned a month in advance and no one, including me, realized the magnitude of the passage I would be reading until the moment the words fell from my mouth. Jesus cried out from the cross, and it was finished. And, his mother, Mary, stood by and watched. Blinking back tears, I managed to voice the words and made my way back to the front pew for the remainder of the service.
Advent seemed so long ago. During that season of joyful anticipation, I had preached a sermon about Mary, and I felt so connected to her, both of us mothers of newborn sons. This night, I sensed her presence in a new way. In the dimly lit sanctuary, the haunting music of the Pieta broke through the silence of the space and the fragility of my spirit. As the choir gave voice to Mary’s pain as she held her dying son, my pain joined hers. Tears began to stream down my face as sobs racked my body.
The meaning of this day never had been more raw, more true. Good Friday isn’t about feeling guilty for sins that nailed Jesus to these wooden beams. It isn’t a set-up for Easter Sunday and the ham and new shoes that accompany that day. Good Friday is about grief. It’s about death and dying, pain and loss, emptiness and hopelessness. It is a dark day. To beam the light in too quickly will render us unable to see.
That night seven years ago, as I sat sobbing and alone, a friend saw my grief and joined me on the front pew. He squeezed my shoulder and gave me a package of tissues. He didn’t attempt to cheer me up or offer me a false promise that, “Everything is going to be okay.” Mopping my face with a handful of Kleenex, my pain cracked open a space in my soul. It was my first realization that Jesus is present in our grief, not in a helium balloon bouquet or Hallmark greeting card kind of way, but in a crawl down into the ditch of despair and sit with you kind of way.
Today, may we put down the donut, the credit card, social media and whatever other forms of anesthesia we use to numb the pain. Good Friday is a day to lean into life’s sadness, anger, fear and grief, knowing that the one who will be there to catch us knows exactly how we feel.
And, if that isn’t good, I’m not sure what is.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is one in a series of reflections written for Holy Week by some of our opinion contributors.
