Sacrifice

It’s Good Friday again, the day when Jesus chose to submit to a night and a day of interrogation, torture, mockery and the unknown in order that great good should be accomplished.  Since Ramsy was diagnosed with cancer, and since he died, this day has meant more to me than in the past.  I think before I used to feel a little bit like a child who has been told by its parents to “say thank you to Aunt Gerda for the money for your college fund”.  You know, grateful but not yet understanding what it all means, and a little obligated.  “Look at the great big sacrifice Jesus made for you.  Aren’t you grateful?  Be thankful now that he died so you don’t have to go to Hell when you die!”  All true, and I used to be awed and, yes, grateful, but it didn’t resonate with me in a profoundly personal way. 

But now I have been through a shaking and re-ordering of my world.  I’ve made a sacrifice that I had no choice but to make.  There was no decision whether or not to give up Ramsy, or even whether or not to watch him suffer the inexorable progress of the brain tumor as it stole pieces of him away.  It just happened, and I was dragged along.  It was hard.

But in that process, and since then, I have been in circumstances where sacrifice has been asked, but the decision has been up to me.  I got to choose whether I was going to insist on my own way- reach out and snatch something I wanted- or whether I was going to keep my hands to myself, open them to God, and say, “Okay.  Let’s do it your way.”  I am shocked at the sheer willpower required to stand still and keep my hands open.  It feels like childbirth.  During one of those teeth-gritting, hang-on-to-the-kitchen-counter, “don’t give in to yourself” times this past year, I wrote in my journal, “I wonder what will be born of this struggle?”  So now when I think of Jesus facing what he knew would be a devastatingly torturous day and all the fears around that, I marvel that he had the strength of will to choose the plan that God had set in front of him and trust that something very good would be born of it.

 I imagine that at the end of that terrible Friday, and on the Saturday that dawned next, Jesus’ followers struggled with agonizing questions.  Why would God let Jesus die now?  It didn’t make any sense!  How would God’s kingdom ever be established now?  How could anything ever be good again after this terrible loss?  What were they supposed to do next?  No dreams, no direction, no understanding. 

I do not understand God’s timing; it does not match mine at all.  I don’t understand why he sometimes acts to grant what we have requested and sometimes does not.  I don’t understand his solutions to the problems I keep seeing, or why there sometimes appears to be no solution.  I frequently (and sometimes vehemently) take issue with the way he runs the universe.   But I believe, more confidently than three years ago, that he does in fact know what he’s doing, that he intends good on a vast scale that I cannot even imagine, and that he is working things toward an ultimate, elegant solution at the end of time.  If Good Friday is about making the hard choice, Saturday is about sitting in the dark aftermath, waiting to be able to see again.  It can be just as torturous as making the sacrifice.

And on this side of my last three years, I am able to see the good that has come, and glimmers and flashes of the good that will come, and to believe that the light is explosively brilliant.  I’m truly, personally grateful now, in a grown-up way, to know that the promise of Easter will be, and is being, fulfilled; and that it is about very much more than avoiding Hell when my life here is done.  It allows hope in hopeless circumstances.  It offers the possibility that even though you are sitting in the dust, your spirit will rise in beauty and strength.  It’s about him setting the example and now carrying us, helping us to trust him and to open our hands. 

It’s for now, while we wait in the mix of mess and wonder, hope and despair.

Peace to you who are being wrung in a Good Friday struggle.

Peace to you who are in the strange Saturday aftermath of what now?

Peace will come, and even rejoicing.