Posted 70 days ago
Easter Celebration: From Despair to Joy
By Christine Sine, Mustard Seed Associates
No festival in the Christian calendar is more dramatic than Easter with its incredible contrast between the pain and agony of Good Friday and the joy and celebration of resurrection Sunday. You may wonder why the Friday before Easter is called “good” when it is obviously a day of mourning. The good refers to the benefit that this day provided to all humankind through the death of Christ on the Cross.
I love the Good Friday service at our Episcopal church. The sanctuary is somber and quiet, the altar stripped of its vestments and the cross shrouded in black. We leave the church in silence with the coldness of death echoing through our thoughts. The horror of Christ’s crucifixion reaches deep into my soul, and as we read the verse “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me,” I am often overwhelmed by memories of times when I too have felt abandoned and alone. Knowing in that moment that Christ endured more pain and suffering than I can ever imagine has the power to open a door for my own emergence out of darkness into new life.
Growing up in Australia where Good Friday is a public holiday and attendance at church an expected tradition for most Christians, following Christ through this journey was never difficult. In the United States where most people work on Good Friday, I found it to be a little more challenging—and my willingness to enter into Christ’s suffering took more discipline and suffering. There are, however, creative ways we can become part of this somber event and enter into some of the agony that Christ must have suffered as he endured the horrors of this last day of his life.
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Churches of all traditions set up Stations of the Cross and invite people from their community to participate in this walk with Jesus towards the cross. If this is not part of your church’s tradition, you might like to do some research and consider ways to bring this important tradition into your congregational worship. Some churches even invite artists in their community to submit pieces of art that represent the different stations. Often non-Christians respond with art that depicts their own pain and grief. Expressions like this are not only instructive but also may open opportunities to share the love of God with people who have never heard the gospel story.
Think of ways to celebrate this important day with your family too. If possible, take the day off work and keep your kids home from school. Set up a homemade cross on your dining table or mantel. On Good Friday morning, shroud the cross with black cloth. In the evening, read through the gospel passages about the crucifixion. If there is time, get each family member to write a poem or draw a picture that expresses their own experience of grief and sorrow over the last year. Place these at the foot of the cross. Leave the cross shrouded until Easter Sunday morning when it can be decorated with flowers. In the evening, attend a Good Friday service as a family.
The following prayer is one that I wrote one Good Friday while reflecting on my own sense of abandonment as a premature infant who spent the first month of my life in hospital. First, I read Psalm 22, which not only speaks of Christ’s sense of rejection, but also connected very intimately to my own feelings of alienation. Connecting the sense of desertion that an infant must feel when alone and isolated in a baby incubator to the agony of Christ’s abandonment was a therapeutic and healing experience for me.
God why did you abandon me
A tiny infant born before my time
Alone and afraid caught in a web of machines
Why this pain of isolation
Deprived of a mother’s love,
Why did you leave me with no one to care
Yet I know you brought me out of the womb
Your love whispered in my mind
Soothing, comforting, embracing
You taught me to trust in you and held me in your arms
O Lord, you were never far off
My strength and my refuge, my salvation from my birth
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