Holy Week is Hard

While it’s been over 10 years now, we lost my Grandpa (Dad’s Dad) on Easter Monday. We spent the days of Holy Week visiting and sitting with Grandpa much like we did with Dad a few months ago. I remember driving to the nursing home and asking God where he was. I loved my Grandpa and I was hurt and I was sad. Dad never really talked about losing his parents, but I know it was hard on him. I remember it was hard watching my Dad try to do all that needed to be done in his role as pastor during such a busy season in the church.

Holy Week was hard.

Just a few years later I lost my other Grandpa to cancer two weeks before Easter and I was heartbroken. Months before he had held my tiny little Lydia in his big strong hands and I remember thinking how fortunate I was to have my Grandpa holding her. For me, he was a very silent force in my life and he left a big hole down here. While my Mom didn’t talk much about it, I know it was hard for her too and as a new, young Mom it was hard watching my own Mom lose her Dad.

Holy Week was hard.

Five years ago, it was just before Holy Week and I sat in the pew with my family watching my Dad once again try to do all that needed to be done in his role as a pastor even as he was saying goodbye, not because he was choosing to but because people had turned their back on him. I wrote before about feeling loss of community and loss of relationship. I was hurting and I was angry and I remember asking God where he was. But even more so I was grieving for my Dad and it was so difficult to see him up there preach about joy all the while knowing he was hurting. He too, was asking God where he was.

Holy Week was hard.

We didn’t go to an Easter service that year and honestly, in the couple of years since, Easter has kind of fallen flat on me. Hearing Dad ask why God had forsaken him has been one of the most heartbreaking and difficult things I’ve witnessed on his journey and on mine. For days, we sat with Dad while he was dying and so many times I silently prayed and cried out asking God why he wouldn’t just take Dad home; asking where he was and feeling like he had abandoned us.

This Holy Week is HARD.

Now, here we are in the midst of a pandemic and it’s Holy Week. If I’m being completely honest, in some ways I’m glad I don’t have to worry about the fanfare of an Easter Sunday service. I’m not ready for it. However, this first holiday without Dad was going to be hard enough and not being able to gather and be physically present with family makes my heart feel so heavy.  It’s really hard to see and feel and believe in the beauty of the Easter Resurrection story when you’re living in what sometimes feels like a constant Good Friday. When you’re asking, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” 

This Holy Week is HARD.

“Before it is finished, there were other words. As Jesus hung dying on the cross, he cried out: ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46, Mark 15:34). The meaning seems obvious, and I have always before been satisfied with the obvious—this is a cry of despair. A cry of abandonment. But this year I have clung to these words for weeks. I have felt how they reverberate like thunder. I begin to see that they are so much bigger than they first appear to be.

They are the first words of a Davidic psalm. And every Jewish listener would have known that they were not the story in full. They were only the beginning, and they invoked a very particular, very familiar ending. Psalm 22 opens with that desperate cry ‘my God, my God’ but goes on to make this powerful claim: ‘For [the Lord] has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help’ (Psalm 22:24). Jesus felt abandoned. Jesus was never abandoned. In Jesus’s few words on the cross, we find the fullness of a powerful story; we find suffering and despair, and we find confidence and hope.” (Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky pg 124)

This Holy Week is hard. AND YET…

Once again, there’s the niggling in my heart reminding me that even when I have difficult memories of this season, even when I feel forsaken, even when grief still weighs heavy on my heart, the Hope and Promise is still here. Even when I feel of little faith He is, as Dad wrote, “picking me up off the floor and placing me back at the table”.

It is Good Friday and, as a kid, on this day I cried during the service because I was sad for Jesus. On this day, as a granddaughter, I cried and was sad for the loss of my grandpa’s. Now on this day, as a daughter, I cry and am sad for the loss of my Dad. And while for some reason, many of my “My God, My God” moments have come right around this church season, no human escapes the abandoned, forsaken moments in their lives. I don’t list all my difficult Holy Week memories for sympathy or for anyone to go into comparative suffering. No doubt I write these things partly for cathartic reasons – grief is real and present in all our lives and we need to deal with it in the way that best works for us – I also share these things because I want to say that in the midst of it all, He is here. He has not abandoned us.

He is here in the little niggling in my heart and if you have that little niggling too – even when it feels like you have no faith at all – trust that it is faith enough for Him. He is here in the sorrow and the separation. He is here in the loud cries of grief and in the silent tears of sadness. The cries of abandonment were only the beginning – not the end – for Jesus. We too, can have the confidence and hope that our cries are only the beginning – not the end for us. In that alone is our Easter joy.