This post is written by my dear friend, Hannah Glad. Hannah is a writer, wife to Matt, and cat-mom of two. She loves coffee and books, and she currently works at Christianity Today. I’m overjoyed to share this piece of hers on hope.
Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. I think about these three days a lot. When in a season that feels like a continuous dark night of the soul, I don’t find comfort in cliché, Christianese platitudes. Instead, I look to those three days. I look to times in Scripture that seemed hopeless.
I think, because we live on this side of Jesus’ resurrection, we don’t often imagine what the experience would’ve been the Friday before. No one could’ve guessed what would happen a few days later. Jesus’ death on the cross would’ve been demoralizing.
Jesus’ disciples abandoned, denied, and betrayed him just a few hours after Jesus had washed their feet and broke bread with them at the last supper. Then they, along with the women involved in Jesus’ ministry, watched as the Son of God, and their friend, was nailed to the cross. They would’ve felt the darkness in that moment, even experiencing the sun’s light disappearing for three hours leading into Jesus crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And then the man who they’d been claiming, to the extent of their limited understanding, was the Messiah breathed his last breath and went limp.
And then he immediately rose from the dead, right?! No. Jesus’ followers sat in the knowledge of his death, what they knew to be final and irreversible, for days. Feelings of despair, loss, confusion, shame, guilt … hopelessness.
During a dark season in my life five years ago, Andy Mineo released two EPs that really resonated with me (funny how that happens), but I want to talk about one song in particular from The Arrow EP – …Lost. In the outro to the song, Andy Mineo includes a recording of himself describing an idea for this EP:
I had this moment where I was on a plane
We was at LGA, it was getting ready to take off
And it just looked gloomy and dark like thunder and lightning
I didn’t even think we was gonna take off
Anyways, we started to take off, the pilot was like, you know
“Brace yourself, there’s gonna be some turbulence”
And we started going through the clouds and everything was shaking
I thought we was gonna die
But, when we got through the clouds, it looked like California
It was like sunny and bright and beautiful
It’s like I almost had forgotten for a second that the sun like even existed
And, I had this moment where I was like
‘Yo, the sun is still here’
Like, it was here the whole time, I just couldn’t see it…
He turns this experience into a metaphor for feeling lost in life. To me, that means being hopeless because without hope, we’re lost; we have no meaning in life. And for good reason, in a song about being hopeless and lost, he references the disciples and alludes to these three days I keep thinking about: Good Friday through Easter Sunday.
Lord, how long am I gonna fly sideways?
This how the twelve must’ve felt on Friday
But I’m still waiting on Sunday
Got me thinking that I should’ve stayed on the runway
The disciples had no Sunday to wait on because they didn’t know what was coming: they had no reason to believe the sun (the Son) was still there. Their experience and the hopeless experiences we have in life feel like being in a storm on a plane that takes off, feeling like you’re going to die because of the turbulence. In the darkness of the storm, it’s hard to hope you’ll live through this. And it’s hard to trust what’s on the other side of those clouds.
I was so high, thought I’d never land
Now I wanna come down
We just hit some turbulence, but if I let go now
How far will I fall?
I can’t see at all…
Because we live on this side of Jesus’ resurrection, we can count on the Son being there. We know in the turbulence of the storm that is life, we’ll break through the clouds and find that the sun’s been out the whole time.
When I get above those clouds, yeah
I know that the sun’s out, I’ma be alright…
THIS. This is why I think about these three days so much. It gives me confidence that I’m going to be alright and not because I think my situations will. To some extent, Jesus’ resurrection didn’t change anything (bear with me); sin, suffering, and death are still a part of our reality. But to another (greater) extent, Jesus’ resurrection changed everything.
I follow a Savior who could’ve ruled by the right of his kingship but instead walked in the dirt, laughed with his disciples, valued those on the outskirts of society, wept with and for his friends, knelt before others to wash their feet, and with incredible humility and grace bore a cross that wasn’t his … all of this would be meaningless apart from his resurrection.
And because we sometimes forget the incredible act this was, read one of my favorite summaries of Jesus’ death and resurrection from Dr. Kelly Kapic’s God So Loved, He Gave:
“God fills up to overflowing even the depths of death itself with the uncontainable fullness of his own infinite life. Only God could do this. The gift of God alone satisfies that which is ‘never satisfied.’ Within the miracle of Jesus’ deep descent, the grave is forced to cry out, ‘Enough!’ It cannot hold God.”
Not only did Jesus rise from the grave, but he returned to those who abandoned and denied him. He showed them the scars on his hands. He ate a meal with them. Reconciling them to himself, their friend, and through their belief in him as their Savior, reconciling them to God. He offers that same reconciliation and relationship to any who accept and promises to return and to make all things new, to work out God’s plan for redemption. We can trust this to be true because we follow a God “who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20).
So, today is Good Friday. I likely don’t have to tell you to put yourself in the shoes of Jesus’ disciples and followers on this day so many years ago because you face your own hopeless situations. If I’m honest, it’s a struggle for me to not let my hopelessness drown me sometimes. But that’s when I return my thoughts to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. The contrast between the events that bookend these days reminds me that my faith allows me to hope when I have no hope. For certain situations, I don’t know when I’ll get above the clouds and I don’t know what I’ll find when I get up there. But I do know that the Son is still there.
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