Waiting for Sunday...

SOUTHBOROUGH L’ABRI NEWSLETTER, SPRING/SUMMER, 2009
49 Lynbrook Road, Southborough, MA 01772

....There are two ways to experience a story. The first way is when you know the ending and are re-reading or re-hearing it. The second is when you don’t know the end or any of the events until they happen. The first can have greater depth and the second has the intensity of suspense in uncertainty.
Many of us know how Bible stories are going to turn out. This is a good thing, but also a liability. If we know a story well it is easy to have a sense that the end was natural, obvious or inevitable. Anybody could have seen it coming. Easter follows Good Friday. It always has. There are no surprises there. We cannot pretend to “not know” about Easter Sunday, but we can try to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who thought that Good Friday was the end of the story of Jesus. If we don’t do that, we miss out on a lot that we need to learn. The problem at hand is that we all live our own lives in the second way, learning of events only as they happen and not knowing how our story will end. We are all future-blind and we need to learn how to live that way, but by faith. The early followers of Jesus could not “fast forward” to Easter Sunday, just as we can’t “fast forward” over times of darkness, grief and disappointment in our own lives.

I think it is hard for us to realize the kind of catastrophe Good Friday was to the disciples. So many hopes smashed, so much grief, helpless outrage and bewilderment. How could they have gotten it so wrong? Where was God? It was too hard to imagine that God the Father had failed or that Jesus had failed either. But what had gone wrong?

There is new interest in Saturday, “Holy Saturday”, but it is not because the Bible tells us much about what took place that day. It was the Sabbath, so the main thing they had to do was to be still. But imagine what it meant for them to be still after what had just happened the day before – their Savior, their Lord, their Hope, their Friend and their God, the one they had given up everything to follow, had just been tortured to death. They couldn’t do any of the normal things to distract themselves because it was the Sabbath. They were stuck having to stay still, think about it, and worship God. But where had God been yesterday?

Somehow, they had no hope for his resurrection. When the news first came to them from the women who had been to the tomb on Sunday morning, they considered it “nonsense”, “an idle tale”. Why? My guess is that whenever Jesus had predicted his crucifixion, the disciples had been so adamant to dissuade him from even thinking about his death, that they never heard him when he went on to speak of his resurrection. Whatever the reason, they lived Friday, all day Saturday and the start of Sunday morning with grief, confusion and without hope.

One implication of all this is that God in his wisdom seems to have allowed his people to go through this time of darkness and even despair, to look into a chasm of hopelessness. It seems also that he allows this to happen to us also, as we live out our life’s story without knowing future events or having a fast forward button available. Most of us have gone through times of bewilderment and despair. Many who come here as students certainly have, but have been taught that despair should not happen to “good Christians” and so do not think they even have the right to talk about it. Thank God that people in the Biblical account did not feel so constrained! God seems to allow these times for reasons that are in any final sense, unknown to us. But perhaps a partial reason might be that we can learn things that we cannot learn when everything is working according to our plans. His presence is with us even when we feel that we are experiencing his absence.

Easter Sunday was a time of lights switching on all over the place, lights of understanding and hope. Suddenly Jesus as king could be taken seriously again. The idea of Jesus as High Priest could be taken seriously for the first time – that his death was his own intentional, once for all sacrifice for the sins of all those who would ever trust in him. So much of his teaching began to make sense to them, sense that it never had made before. They could suddenly see how he was the “good shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep”, the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.

So, as we hear the story of Jesus, knowing its ending, let’s still try to experience it from the shoes of those who couldn’t see Easter coming. If we dare to look into the dark of their hopelessness, we may learn more about the brightness of the lights that came on at the resurrection, and that are still shining. That way we may also learn something about navigating our own future-blind lives by faith.