The profound darkness of Good Friday serves as an essential precursor to the radiant journey toward Easter Day's light, according to spiritual writer Simon Smart. The Easter story powerfully reminds humanity to resist despair while tenaciously confronting life's intertwined joys and sorrows. The crucifixion narrative's potency emerges from its depiction of God himself suffering alongside humanity during our most devastating existential travails.
Personal Loss and Spiritual Searching
Twelve months ago, I experienced the profound loss of a close friend to brain cancer at just fifty-three years old. Following the initial shock of diagnosis, he survived two years, with chemotherapy and radiotherapy holding the tumor at bay for approximately eighteen months. During that period, we surfed together, attended football matches, and enjoyed family gatherings—his vitality making it difficult to accept his terminal condition.
Once treatments concluded, his decline accelerated dramatically. The final months proved excruciating for him and his family, with the concluding weeks marked by unspeakable sadness. Witnessing death's gradual claim as he faded away remained profoundly confronting. During our last encounter, as he struggled to maintain consciousness amid evident discomfort, he thanked me for visiting while joking about being "much improved the next time I see you"—his final humorous remark to me.
Recently, his wife and four children scattered his ashes at one of his beloved Sydney beaches. The reality of his ashes still feels nearly unbelievable. With the first anniversary of his death coinciding with Easter weekend, I've contemplated extensively whether the Easter story's promised hope genuinely speaks to such dreadful sadness and loss.
The Easter Narrative's Confrontation with Darkness
I have always discovered profound comfort in the Easter weekend's rhythmic progression, particularly how the Easter story directly faces darkness without evasion. Traditional Good Friday observances maintain solemnity by focusing intensely on Christ's suffering. The crucifixion narrative resonates with universal human experiences of betrayal, injustice, violence, heartbreak, and loss.
Jesus's cry from the cross—"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"—expresses desolation that all humans encounter at various life stages. Yet this darkness represents a necessary precursor to Easter Day's luminous journey. This narrative arc reflects and remains essential for those drawing comfort from the story.
Divine Suffering as Transformative Concept
The crucifixion symbolizes a cruel, shameful, and agonizing physical death. More significantly, it represents God himself in human form enduring this trauma, identifying with human struggle to such extent that he literally participates in it. The story's potency emerges from the understanding that, both historically and presently, as we experience devastating existential travails, God himself suffers alongside humanity.
German theologian Jürgen Moltmann experienced this transformative understanding firsthand. Drafted into the German army at sixteen in 1943, he served in a Hamburg anti-aircraft battery during British bombing that destroyed the city and killed forty thousand people—including the friend standing beside him.
After three years in prisoner-of-war camps, Moltmann returned to Germany "shattered and broken." Introduction to the suffering God concept brought him to faith, noting that "a theology which did not speak of God [as] the One who was abandoned and crucified would have had nothing to say to us then."
Resurrection's Surprising Joy
Easter celebrations inevitably take their hopeful turn by Sunday, offering reason for surprising joy: death reversed, the desolate one resurrected. If the cross symbolizes divine suffering, the empty tomb presents death defeated, with hope and life springing from arid ground.
When I bid farewell to my dying friend and he humorously mentioned improvement at our next meeting, he joked while simultaneously expressing serious belief in resurrection promise and restoration in afterlife existence.
Cosmic Narrative of Meaning
While death casts shadows over all existence, resurrection notion has provided, for two millennia, reason to perceive existence not as random chaos but as grand narrative of meaning and purpose. British writer Francis Spufford summarizes this narrative: "Far more can be mended than you know."
Easter's claim asserts that resurrection marked a cosmos-altering event transforming everything—present and future—where all that damages, spoils, and limits life, including death itself, will ultimately be overcome. This offers hope for:
- Broken bodies restored
- Reunion with lost loved ones
- Injustice overcome
- Loneliness and heartbreak forgotten
- All life-distorting elements made untrue
Thus, Easter's ancient events continue providing reason to tenaciously face life's joys and sorrows without surrendering to despair, regardless of circumstances—even when saying goodbye to much-loved, vibrant friends.
