Saturday, March 22, 1997

To know the real joy of Easter, we must understand the sorrow of Good Friday

By Lauren R. Stanley

Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - This weekend, thousands of people will gather in Jerusalem to walk the narrow, crowded streets of the Old City, tracing the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth as he was led to his death.

This Sunday - known as both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday - marks the beginning of the most intense week in the Christian calendar. This is the week when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph; the week when he had his last supper with his disciples and washed their feet; when he prayed in the Garden at Gethsemane to be able to follow God's will and not his own; when he was betrayed and arrested; questioned and beaten and condemned to a very painful, very public death.

Christians around the world will be observing various services this week to mark these events in the life of Jesus. Some of the services will be quiet, some penitential, some filled with reserved joy.

But come Good Friday, Christians who have been intentional in the Lenten season will find themselves plunged into darkness and despair.

Because everything we believe as Christians comes to a brutal halt on Good Friday, the day when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.

Now this is the end of the 20th century. For nearly 2,000 years we've known the "rest of the story," as Paul Harvey says. We've known that on the third day, Jesus was resurrected from the dead by God the Father. So it can be difficult sometimes for us to really descend into the darkness and despair of Good Friday.

But we can't get to the joy of Easter morning - we can't really understand what Easter is all about - if we don't make an intentional, painful stop at the cross of Good Friday.

Part of the difficulty of living into the despair of the cross comes, I think, from the fact that we are a fast-forward generation of Americans attuned more to the 8-second sound bite than to the deliberate and painful slowness of the cross.

We are the people of the "clicker" - the television remote control that allows us to skip across the channels without being forced to endure whatever it is that we do not wish to endure.

One of the comic strips in the local paper - "Sally Forth" - spent a recent week spoofing the remote control syndrome from which so many of us suffer. It has been a good laugh, as well as a poignant poke at the way many of us live.

We have our calendars divided into half-hour segments, so that we can, I guess, fill our days and nights with activities. Some of my friends use different-colored markers for each person in the family, or for each sort of event, so that in a quick glance (notice that need for speed?), we can tell what we are supposed to be doing and where we are supposed to be at any given moment.

So it should come as not surprise that living and dying into the cross of Good Friday can be difficult for many of us.

Because living and dying into the cross means taking time to slow down, to contemplate the awfulness that humanity can create, and to despair about what the poets call the "dark night of the soul."

But I wonder: How can we ever know - really KNOW - the joy of the resurrection that comes on Easter morning if we have never known the despair that precedes it on Good Friday?

Good Friday is a time for us to sit intentionally and quietly so that we may know that God is God. It is a time for us to cry our lament to God:

"I will say to the God of my strength,

Why have you forgotten me?

and why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me?" (Psalm 42:9)

If we can find in ourselves the discipline and the desire to share that lament with God, then on Easter morning we will be able to say with real feeling, arising out of our despair into a moment of joy, "Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia."

To know the real joy of Easter, we must stop long enough to understand the sorrow of Good Friday.

(Lauren R. Stanley, a former assistant news editor for the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, now attends Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., where she is studying for the Episcopal priesthood. Readers may write to Stanley care of Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, 790 National Press Building, Washington, D.C., 20045.)