Longing For Sunday

I write from my bed in a dark room flat on my back. I write on Good Friday, and I beg my husband to tell me why in the world Jesus had to be in the grave for so long. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week feel interminable. Jesus, what did you do for all of that time in the grave? My husband says he thinks that it is so no one would question the fact that He was indeed dead. He wasn’t just partly dead or mostly dead. But still…

Is that not what suffering feels like? Never-ending. Why does the night stretch on and on and on, Lord? Where is the light of the morning you promised? Will it ever come? Will light ever shine again? Is there hope? And yet….there’s hope in the questioning.  

Please hasten, Sunday. Please don’t ache so agonizingly, Friday and Saturday.  But you come, and you linger, every year. 24-hour segments strung together, like a pain that no anesthesia can quell. 

At this point, 2000 years later, I am so glad that it is simply a symbolic darkness, that really, He is risen and has been, and death knows its fate. He’s not in that grave. And yet it still stings, doesn’t it? The remembrance; The silence and solemn nature of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services. Oh, we long for comfort, joy, resurrection. We are meant to. We were created with the longing. These are the three days of the year when the longing is most profound, and when I torture my husband with unanswerable questions regarding Jesus’ battle with death and time in the grave. 

Jesus, I’m so sorry. I’m so desperately sorry that you suffered and died. I’m so much more sorry that within your heart you took on the brokenness, sorrow, and falleness of humanity. I cannot fathom the bone-crushing weight of the sin of the world. Or the knowledge that you would have to carry it to the most dehumanizing and agonizing death. 

I rest in your love and grace as I grieve your death today. And I long for Sunday.