Good Friday

I have walked the early steps of grief with many people. As a pastor, I was called in to be with people near the end of their lives and I was often present at the point of death to provide care for those who survived. As a suicide first responder, I took my turn at “on call” duties ready to be dispatched at any hour of the day or night when a suicide occurred to provide support services to family members as law enforcement officers conducted their investigations. As a law enforcement chaplain, I was part of the official process of death notification for those who had lost family members to crime, accidents and other sudden and traumatic events. Other than funeral directors, there are few career paths that lead one to the place of death as often as I took that journey with others.

Often I walked with strangers: people whom I had just met and who didn’t know me before tragedy entered their lives.

There are no hard and fast rules for those situations. Some people handle the news in near silence, unable to find words to express their emotions. Others cry and wail. A few fall to the floor. I learned years ago that the floor is your friend in some situations of grief. A person won’t fall further down than the floor. If they can be lowered to the floor gently, they are less likely to be injured. I also learned that there are a lot of situations in this world where the appropriate response is to do nothing, to say nothing, to simply be present and witness the moments. A person who is struck down by grief needs some time to process the overwhelming circumstances in which they find themself.

Many people, however, are not good at waiting. I found it to be especially true of the cops with whom I worked. They are people of action. They are doers. They want to have a task to perform. Some of them are so uncomfortable with 15 or 20 minutes of silence that I learned to give them small chores to perform so that they didn’t rush the process: “Officer, could you please find some water for this person?” “Could you bring around your car so we have a warm place to sit?”

We are not practiced at waiting. We want to act. We want to do things. I used to say that in the church, we grieve by feeding people. Dinners brought to the home, funeral luncheons prepared, groceries brought to the home of grief - a lot of food just shows up when people are grieving. It is something that witnesses to grief can do when they don’t know what else to do.

Sometimes, however, people just need time to sit with grief. They don’t need food, or water, or words for a little while. They need to cry and think. They do not need to be alone.

Holy Week offers many gifts to faithful followers of Jesus. One of those gifts is the possibility of practicing grief. One thing I learned through years of experience is that none of us is immune from grief. l remember so clearly the night when my phone rang and I expected the person on the other end of the line to be asking me to go out and help carry news of tragedy to yet another grieving family. Instead it was my cousin telling me that my brother was dead. It turned out that a massive heart attack ended his life, but at the time, we did not know any details. We just knew that his body had been recovered from his work van which had slid into the Missouri River. As I lay in bed, trying to process the news, I was acutely aware that just across the hallway from our bedroom was the bedroom where my mother was sleeping and that among the tasks of the time to come would be telling her that her son had died. She outlived two of her children. The world isn’t supposed to work that way. A mother’s grief is unique.

Today, Good Friday, our primary task is to wait. To sit with the grief of the world. We have time to ponder how the simple man Jesus threatened the powers of his day. Empire always has the power to crush innocents with impunity. Rome was particularly cruel in the methods of execution employed. We can talk about resurrection, but there will be time for that later. Right now, today, it is time to simply sit with the grief and horror and the enormity of loss. God become human has shared every part of human existence, has experienced grief, has cried tears, and even experienced the cruelty of an unjust execution. Death is real. We call the day Good Friday not because of some expectation of pleasure, but because we find ourselves with nowhere to turn but to God. It is God Friday.

Of course, most Christians don’t allow time to sit with grief. When a death occurs, we drop everything. We don’t go to work. We stay home from school. We gather together and allow grief to run its course. Holy Week, however, is generally a week of business as usual, full steam ahead. We might cram in one or two special Holy Week services, but that is it. We have other things to occupy our minds and our energies.

And so we take up the observance as a discipline. It is one of the oldest rituals of Christianity - the observance of the death of Jesus. We do this every year. We read the verses of the tennebrae service. We extinguish the candles. We sit in the dark for a few minutes. And we know we will do it again next year. Over and over again. It is practice for the realities of this life. One day the theme will be the death of another person we love. One day the theme will be our own death.

But that isn’t today. Today is a day to simply wait and watch and sit with grief. It is enough.

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