When You Feel Numb on Good Friday

I’m approaching Easter this year largely void of feeling. It feels strange to stare at those words, as I’ve just written them on the page. It feels like a strange thing to say—or a faithless one—to approach the high point of the church year with little anticipation, with little emotion. It is the resurrection of Jesus we’re talking about, after all, that cataclysmic inbreaking of the New Creation, that first fruit of all that’s to come. And yet this year, I’m wrestling to give it more emotion than a data point and a date circled on my calendar.

I feel like I should feel something. I should feel visceral grief over the sufferings of Jesus or perhaps tear-filled awe over his sacrifice or exuberant joy over the resurrection. But there are no emotional highs, no big “feels.” Just the steady passing of days.

In various stages of my spiritual life, I would probably have tried to manufacture an emotional experience, as if it was a necessary part of faithfulness. Although it was never to my memory explicitly taught, I somehow implicitly absorbed the need to feel big feelings for God. It was cultivated in me through worship concerts and summer camps, youth retreats and celebrated experiences. More than Wesley’s “strangely warmed heart,” I wanted mine engulfed in flames because something in that would demonstrate God’s presence and my love for him.

This seems like a good point to clarify that I think emotions can be positively wonderful. I am far from anti-emotion. They are designed by God, and He can work in and through them in a multitude of ways. Our faith is far from a cold, cerebral affair—it engages all of our being, including our emotions. And many of us, in various seasons or circumstances or temperaments find our faith engaging our emotions in powerful and transformative ways.

But what about when we don’t? What about when we sit numb on Good Friday?

As I’ve reflected on this in this season, I’ve considered the range of emotions felt by those close to Jesus through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. There was disbelief and regret. There was fear and confusion. Surely, by the time the women were walking to the tomb on Sunday morning, there was the numb exhaustion of grief that comes after too much weeping.

And yet the Resurrection came for them all. Jesus appeared to Mary, weeping at the tomb, and he came to the disciples locked away in a room. He showed himself to those who quickly believed and to those who doubted and asked to touch him. The resurrection was not less true because of their emotions or emotional response. And it is not less true or less meaningful because of mine.

The resurrection of Jesus is a steady, fixed point, whether I recall it with great emotion or with numbness. It is a signpost and a stake in the ground, declaring the New Creation and the promise of the redemption and restoration of all things. This is part of its good news to us: in highs and lows, all seasons and circumstances, it holds out a steady message of hope. With our bodies, our brains, and, yes, even our emotions, we rehearse the story of God’s redemption each year—the story of Christ died, Christ risen, and Christ coming again—because we need anchoring in this story. We need its fixed point year after year, so that regardless of our ability to “feel the feels,” we remember.

Your “hallelujah” this Easter Sunday may be a quiet one, but the Risen Jesus comes to you just the same. Thanks be to God.

A Year of Lent

We are about to reenter the liturgical season of Lent (which begins next week). In many ways, it feels like we’ve had a year of Lent. A year of deprivation and simplicity. A year of sacrifice. A year of keen awareness of our mortality, weakness, and sin. I wrote last year that our Lent wouldn’t end with Easter, and (sadly) how right I was.

I’ll be honest with you. The thought of “giving up” something for Lent this year makes my eyes glaze over a bit. The younger me might have felt guilty about that. But today, I’m making space for the reality that this has been a hard season. It’s been a season where I’ve needed a discipline of celebration and delight—and a discipline of hope—to counteract life amidst ongoing transition, life amidst sickness, life amidst a pandemic. If you’re in a similar place today, I can at least offer you the assurance that you aren’t alone.

Something I have long appreciated about the season of Lent is its insistence on making me slow down before jumping ahead to a “happy ending.” Before the shouts of resurrection victory on Easter Sunday, we walk through a long season of sitting with the reality of suffering and sin. This rhythm shapes us, and I believe it makes the hope of the resurrection grow that much deeper in our hearts. We sit in the dark so that we can glory in the light.

This is true of rhythms and disciplines in which we voluntarily put ourselves in that place, but it’s also true for seasons when lack and suffering and brokenness in all its forms are thrust upon us. In that sense, this long Lent need not be wasted time. This dark, too, can make us glory in the light.

Saying such things does not remove the pain of this season, just as the resurrection did not remove the pain our Savior suffered on the cross. But it does anchor us in one of the deep truths of our faith: we worship a resurrecting God. Nothing else can speak to our sorrow and grief and uncertainty like the Risen Jesus. And sitting with sorrow, grief, and uncertainty makes us rejoice all-the-more that those realities are not the end of the story.

So as we enter this season of Lent, instead of feeling as though you must engage in a particular form of Lenten practice, ask yourself what will cultivate the power of that Story in your heart. (As with so much else, it may look different this year than it has in the past.) What will help you to slow down and be ready for joy when it comes? What will help you be aware of suffering and sorrow and sin—but also rooted in hope? What will prepare you to glory in the Light?

Because this Lent will not last forever. Resurrection is coming. Thanks be to God.

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If you’re looking for a few ideas for how to mark the season of Lent, my friend Kristen has a helpful guide with some resources and links. You can find it here.

Hope More Audacious Than Heaven

We are living in a time in which there is no doubt that the world is broken. We’re feeling in real time the effects of all that is not right with the world. We’re facing sickness and death. We’re seeing conflict and greed and pride. We’re seeing broken systems that leave people vulnerable. We’re witnessing violence and dehumanization. We bear the ache of uncertainty and upheaval, of separation from each other, of anxiety and depression. I know I’m not alone in the desperate prayer Come, Lord Jesus.

In the face of such a time as this, the resurrection offers me audacious hope.

This hope is not ultimately, as many have explained it, about going to heaven when I die. I cannot count the times I’ve heard the comfort and hope of the Christian life described only this way. But the hope of the resurrection is not about escapism. It’s not about jumping ship and flying away to a disembodied, better place. It’s not one that lets me wash my hands of the world, believing it’s all going to burn.

No, the hope we have is much deeper—and, yes, more audacious. It is a hope that clings to a coming new creation. Jesus’ resurrection declares that our hope is not just about the renewal and rebirth of our souls (though this is a critical part of it), but it is also about a renewal and remaking of all of creation. At the end of the biblical story, we are given a picture of a new heavens and new earth, a place of tangible beauty and wholeness, made and remade for us. It is Eden restored, where we live and breath in resurrection bodies. Jesus’ resurrection was the guarantee of this, the first picture and first fruit of a new creation. The hope we have is not of going to heaven—it is of heaven coming down to earth, just as Jesus taught us to pray.

When you look at the world around you, it is one thing to believe that God will take you from it. It is another thing entirely to believe that God will return and transform it, will break it open like a seed and allow his life to burst forth. It is one thing to believe that we will be taken away from pain and sickness and death. It is another thing entirely to believe that pain and sickness and death themselves will be taken away, forever eradicated, fully and completely destroyed. I believe this sort of hope takes even more audacity to believe—to stand in the face of what our human experience has taught us to be unbreakable, unrelenting tyrants (sin and pain, sickness and death) and insist that they will not have the last say, that they will finally meet their end.

So as you stare out at a world that is broken and aching for redemption, stand with defiant hope. This is not the end. There will come a day when we will be restored—and creation will be as well.

Our Lent Won't End With Easter This Year

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.

People of the Resurrection and the Nature of Hope

The world has finally come alive again. The trees are hazy green with infant leaves or laden with dainty blossoms of pink and white. I could smell their syrupy perfume on the breeze last night long after darkness hid them from view. The grass pulled color from the earth seemingly overnight, and its thick blanket beckons picnic blankets and bare toes. There’s a steady stream of faces passing our house these days, people out for a run, out with the kids, freed from hibernation. It’s glorious. 

We knew it was coming. We knew winter couldn’t last forever. But every year here, the life and newness and beauty still astound me when spring finally arrives.

I’ve been talking to a good friend lately about the nature of hope. We both have found adulthood breaking and reshaping our understanding of it. The problem is we have so many varying definitions and pictures of it. (And yes, this is true even amongst Christian circles.) Some turn hope into sheer optimism or wishful thinking. It becomes a blind sheen of positivity that yells “it’s only a flesh wound” even after it’s reduced to a limbless stump (Monty Python, anyone?). Some use hope to fuel dualism, ignoring our present physical reality in favor of a detached, spiritual plane. Some have adopted hope as a spiritualized mind-over-matter technique. 

I believe all of these fall short of the biblical picture of hope. Biblical hope is deeply rooted and has radical implications for our present reality. Biblical hope does not remove us from our circumstances or numb us to them, but it does give us solid ground and a steady anchor so we can endure faithfully. 

Back in the not-so-long-ago depths of winter, would the reality of a spring day like this one have removed our “pain”? In many ways, no. My nose would still have been cold and perpetually running. I would still have bundled up, covered with hat and gloves and scarf. We still would have groaned when we saw the next blizzard coming, and the next, and the next. The promise of spring would not have stilled the nor’easter winds or kept the power on, and it would not have kept my house warm. The days would still have been short, the darkness long. We still would have done the heavy-lifting of shoveling out the car and the sidewalk, still scraped layers of ice off the windshield. We had a sure hope that spring would come, but it did not remove this “pain,” nor did it cure our collective seasonal affective disorder. 

But it did keep us moving. It promised us that one day the snow would melt, the sun would return, that what we saw was not the whole of reality. So we did not give into despair. Spring did not make winter any shorter, but it did promise us that if we could make it a few more months, a few more weeks, a few more days, everything would change. And that hope did not disappoint us. 

When our Lord Jesus suffered, he endured, the Bible tells us, for “the joy set before him.” He endured in hope, but his hope was not an anesthetic. He knew what was to come, of his victorious resurrection, but the “cup” was still bitter. He was rejected by those he loved. He was betrayed and abandoned by those he trusted. He stretched out in the dark of Gethsemane, crying as he submitted to the will of his Father. He was tempted to the uttermost. His body was beaten, broken, bled-out. His was one well acquainted with suffering and familiar with grief. He truly and genuinely suffered. His hope, his confident child-like trust in his Father, his surety in his ability to keep his promises, enabled him to endure suffering faithfully. And that hope did not disappoint him—it was fully realized when the breath returned to his lungs, and he emerged from the tomb victorious and alive.

The entire cosmos is groaning through the last dregs of "winter," longing for the full restoration of the New Heavens and New Earth. We, like Jesus, do not escape the suffering of the world we live in. Our bodies still break. Our relationships still strain. Our dreams bitter with disappointment or disillusionment. We continue to shake off the entangling grasp of sin. We still cry, “How long, O Lord?” 

But we have a sure hope, a hope inherently tied to the Resurrection of Jesus. This hope does not remove us from pain or answer all of our questions, but it does enable us to endure. It stands defiantly in the places of brokenness, those places which fall prey to the ragings of, as the old liturgies said, “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” and it boldly declares “This is not all there is. This is not the end.” 

It’s the hope that brings tears springing to my eyes when we sing Sandra McCracken’s words: 

We will feast in the house of Zion. 
We will sing with our hearts restored.
He has done great things, we will say together.
We will feast and weep no more.

We are not only people of the Cross. We are people of the Resurrection. We wait, and sometimes we weep. But we wait and endure in hope. And this hope will not disappoint us.