Read: Mark 11, 14-15
We’ve spent the whole of the Lenten journey to date tending different aspects of joy. We accompanied God, Noah, and all earthly creatures into persistent joy, the kind that perseveres through crisis and becomes the bedrock of the rainbow promise. We waited expectantly for God’s promises with Abraham and Sarah, letting the joy of future fulfillment seep into the present. We experienced the liberating joy that God set before the Israelites in the form of a new life shaped by the Ten Commandments. We dove into the transformative joy that God called out of the Israelites in the wilderness with the healing serpent on its pole. We considered the vocational joy that God leads us to find in the places where our deep gladness and world’s deep hunger meet. It’s been quite a journey. We have arrived at Holy Week, where joy is everywhere but also feels like it’s nowhere—especially not anywhere near the cross or the tomb.
As the story of Jesus’ last week of earthly ministry leads us through the next seven days, we will notice all the different faces of joy we have learned to recognize over the past six weeks. We will notice something else, too: the hiddenness of joy on Good Friday; the perceived total absence of it at the foot of the cross; the despair that wells up in the place where joy once was. The words of the prophet Jeremiah could belong to all of us who stand at Calvary: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?” (Jeremiah 8:18, 22)
With prayer and reflection, we have been training all season for this week. We may not feel joy at the cross or the tomb, but suffering does not mean that God’s gift of joy has disappeared forever. This week, there is violence and betrayal, heartbreak and hollowing grief. God’s child is murdered. Even as the heavens are torn open, as darkness descends over the whole land, and as God-among-us bleeds, God can see a deeper reality in which this, even this, will be folded into Easter joy.
When joy seems eclipsed this week by the terror of Good Friday, let the grief be present. Don’t move too quickly from Good Friday to Easter morning. The sacred story rehearses something we already know deep in our bones: there are moments in life when it feels like joy has been destroyed. But Easter morning is coming. In the darkness before the dawn, we will look into the tomb where we expect to see death, and the joy we thought was gone will reveal itself in all its resurrection glory.