Holy Week and the Silence of God
“Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed.” These words are from the Collect for today, Wednesday in Holy Week. This is theologically sound, yet very difficult to embrace. When we are suffering, it can be easy to think that God is absent. Why can we pray and feel nothing but silence when we most want peace?
On the cross, Jesus feels the depths of abandonment and cries out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” In so doing, he reveals the length God will go to in order to reconcile all creation to God. And yet we know that God the Father did not abandon Jesus, nor will he abandon us.
On the night before he died, Jesus told his disciples, “I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you” (John 14:18) and after the resurrection he said, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
We know that Jesus died on Good Friday and was sealed in a tomb through Holy Saturday. His followers were confused and scared. All seemed lost. What humans did to God the Son was not unusual, but God’s response was world changing. The amazing gift of grace is that while we were yet sinners, Jesus died for us, and that is not the end of the story. Spoiler alert, God raised Jesus from the dead, bodily. This is not a metaphor but resurrection.
There at the hinge of all human history, we learned how far God would go out of love for us. But we shouldn’t jump ahead so fast this week that we fail to see how Jesus is abandoned by most everyone he knew, though the women stayed close to him and were at the cross. If we don’t sit with Jesus’ abandonment and death, we could miss how much our Savior understands betrayal, alienation, and grief. We don’t worship a distant God standing in judgment over us, but a risen Lord who knows our very real sorrows and understands more fully than anyone.
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It can be difficult to see how God is present as we careen toward problems with no view of the Divine ahead of us through our windshield. Yet when we look out the rear view mirror, we find God’s fingerprints everywhere. So we know that Jesus has not left us comfortless, but is with us to the end of the age. When God seems absent, we can look back on how God has been present in our lives up until now, knowing that even in the silence, God is there. God loves you completely and has not left you alone, even in that solitude.
Just as the dawn follows the night, light will break through into the darkness you are experiencing, even if it does not come when or how you wish it would. But don’t hear me saying this in a way that dismisses the very real pain, for God knows what that absence feels like far too well for us to need to act like the sufferings of this present time do not matter. And when others around us experience pain and loss, we can be Christ’s arms to hold them knowing that the peace that passes understanding is in the midst as you sit with someone in grief or sorrow beyond words to comfort.
peace,
Frank
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary
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