Sitting with Our Grief
Whenever you’re with a family in a funeral home waiting for the funeral of their loved one to start, friends will come by and express their condolences. I’ve given up being shocked by what people say, however well-meaning it might be.
Things like, “You just have to be strong.” Why? They’ve just lost someone they love. Why do they have to be strong right now? Why isn’t it OK for them not to be strong?
Or “You’ll get better.” In some ways yes, they will learn to live with their grief, but in other ways, they won’t ever get over this moment. Sometimes, I get the feeling people say that to encourage people to get over their grief so that their friends themselves can get back to their normal lives.
Yet, we know that we have to resolve our grief. We have to sit with our grief long enough to put meaning to our suffering, to express gratitude for our loved one’s life and then, align our lives with the truths we’re now learning that only death can teach us.
Holy Week is the handful of days the church must sit with its grief. We must sit with the final hours of Jesus’ life – the poignancy of the Last Supper, the horror of His arrest and torture, the finality of His death…and remember.
Freedom can be taken for granted if we don’t take time to remember when we were slaves.
Being found loses its joy if we don’t remember what it was to be lost.
Being alive doesn’t mean much if we don’t remember what it was like when we were dead.
The world wants us to hurry through Holy Week. They don’t want to know the grief. They don’t want to feel the hopelessness. They don’t want to sit for long in the darkness.
But it’s the sitting in the darkness that makes the light easier to see. It’s not being able to see anything that makes seeing everything so transformative.
Don’t hurry through the darkness. Sit with Jesus and His grief in Gethsemane. Sit with Him in the agony of His death. Sit with Him in the haunting silence of His burial.
Sit here. Sit with your grief in the darkness of Calvary.
We’ll need all our strength for what comes next.
This essay was first posted in Scot McKnight’s newsletter.
