The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. A somber refrain accompanies the smearing of ashes on a succession of foreheads: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Or as one friend frankly ad libbed, his fingers rubbing ash: “You’re going to die too.”
We haven’t needed the smudge of ash or Lenten fasts to remind us of our fragility this year. I see it in the homemade masks at the grocery store, and in the mask on my kitchen counter, “just in case,” that should not need to exist so small. I see it in the haunting pictures and stories on my newsfeed. I feel it in the distance from friends and family, in those I can’t embrace, in the ache after a video chat that reminds me that no screen can replace physical touch. I feel it in our collective fear, anxiety, isolation, and grief.
This year, Lent is embodied by us all. A virus is reminding us of something we prefer to forget: death is a specter we all must reckon with. We cannot escape the fact that though we live with eternity in our hearts, we live with bodies that break down, with bodies that die.
This serious sort of meditation makes many of us uncomfortable. We would much prefer a silver lining or the power of positive thinking. We’d much prefer to consider suffering in the past-tense—or better yet, from a third-person perspective. To sit with the once-living, now ash heap, to sit with sin and death and all their macabre fruits is painful and disquieting. But it’s only in this vacuum of brokenness that the resurrection means anything.
Today is Good Friday. I will admit, my emotions are rather dull. This is not how I envisioned the Lenten season would unfold. It’s not how I envisioned marking Easter. The days have slowly slipped by as we’ve all scrambled into a new normal, as we’ve all struggled to survive. And now I find myself in Holy Week—numb.
I wonder if the disciples felt numb before that quiet, earth-shattering day. They waited too, locked away, uncertain, fearful, grieving.
We sit with them in the dark today. And though Easter will come, the deprivations of this global Lent will not cease. We will continue to sit with our uncertainty and fear. We will continue on stripped of things and people we love. Our church doors will stay closed. Our celebrations will stay cancelled.
And yet. Even in this reality, even without the pomp and circumstance, even if you, like me, find yourself empty of feeling, Easter will still be worth shouting about.
The resurrection does not instantly take away the pain or fear we may feel today. It does not take away the presence of death in our world. The message of Easter Sunday does not magically make our experience of reality “better” like a kiss from a mother on a scraped knee.
But—even while we are all too aware that we wait in the “not yet”—the resurrection changes everything. Nothing else can combat the effects of sin and death. Nothing else can speak to our sorrow and grief and uncertainty like the Risen Jesus.
The resurrection gives us defiant hope in the face of catastrophe and suffering. It gives us hope that death will not have the final word, that sin will not always be a battle to fight. It gives us hope that ultimately and finally the brokenness we see in our world and in our own souls will be healed.
So this weekend, though we may all still be apart, though we cannot join in a resounding refrain together—celebrate just the same. As we continue on in the waiting and longing for the healing of our world, fix your anchor in the only truth strong enough to hold through any storm—He is Risen. He is Risen indeed.