When Holy Week comes around each year, I normally dread “Sunday is coming” posts. I don’t want to skip past the bad parts. I don’t want to skip Jesus’ death. We need to sit in the weight of that devastation, I think. We need to feel the burden of Jesus’ unjust death at the hands of a power-hungry Empire. We can’t miss how Jesus became a scapegoat. How the cross mirrors back to us our thirst for violence.
Yeah. Normally I crave slowing down and sitting in the tension of it all. We can’t throw pastel colored tinsel atop the cross and skip to the empty grave because it makes us feel better.
But this year? Dear God, I’m craving Sunday. I’m longing for resurrection. Not just the hypothetical kind where our dreams find life after death, but the real kind. I long for the day Hallie Scruggs’ precious body is resurrected and she is reunited with her parents. I am desperate for the day every victim of the Covenant shooting and their families experience the fullest life imaginable, together, in the presence of God.
I don’t get it. Like I don’t know how resurrection works. But I’m starting to see why Paul said if there is no resurrection of the dead, the whole thing is useless.
Right now, my single thread of hope is this: Just as Christ was raised to life, we will be raised to life. Christ’s resurrection means the whole thing- every corner of the universe- does not end in death, but life.
The last ten days in our city have felt like a collective heaving. Bent over. Wailing. Anger. Apathy. Parents and students begging for change while politicians in power prepare their next scapegoat. This is Friday. We are in Friday. I suppose we always have been, but it’s exposed naked for all of us to see.
And if all I see is all there is— I am honestly hopeless. Not in a cliché sense. But in the wide-awake-at-3AM-wondering-how-we’re-going-to-make-it-through sense.
Today, Jesus’ resurrection offers me hope that the victims of the Covenant shooting and every other shooting and act of violence will not end in death, but life. That in the same way Jesus took the child’s hand in Mark 5 and said, “Rise up, little girl!” Jesus will gently take the hand of every victim of violence and say, “Rise up!”
-Savannah
Writing Prompt: Do you need to sit in Friday? Do you crave Sunday? Check in with your body and soul this Holy Week. Write about what resurrection brings to mind.
Recommended Reading: Mark 5:21-43
Saturday is my default position. I know suffering as an objective fact, and I'm often anxious to see resurrection reveal itself as the truth that trumps that fact. I find myself caught in doing the math of Saturday, trying to figure out and explain to myself how the algebra of penal substitution works out. I know the equation's solution but "with fear and trembling" I try to show my work on paper, wanting it to be undeniable that x does indeed cancel out y. I feel like this will make Sunday more true.
So, Savannah, your words cut through my posture of head scratching and fearful erasing: "Christ’s resurrection means the whole thing- every corner of the universe- does not end in death, but life." The simplicity, goodness, and magnitude of that sentence is what I want to embrace this Easter. Christ's resurrection is enough in and of itself without my defense or explanation of it.
It all ends in life. It all ends in life. It all ends in life.
This year, I am more aware of the injustice of Jesus’ innocent death. I don’t avoid it like I used to. I hope the Easter Sunday resurrection theme will help me solidify my hope that Jesus works injustice to a great good.
Also, I know that the Lord knows everyone’s genetic code. He won’t need our original atoms to create our resurrected bodies—as usual, he will speak us into perfect re-creation.