This past Good Friday was a strange and sorrowful day as I spent several hours of it at my grandfather’s deathbed saying goodbye. Even though he lived a long and wonderful life (100 years!), I still feel the sting of loss. So this week’s featured article resonnated with me. In “Seeing My Child Face Death Made Me Rethink the Passion,” Nijay Gupta tells of his young daughter’s cancer battle. She was just one year old and she faced the very real threat of death. After several years of treatment, thankfully, she survived. Gupta talks about how the two years they battled the threat of death—through chemotherapty, tests, procedure after procedure—left him scarred. “Any time I hear about family medical problems, especially involving children, I start weeping, almost autonomically. I am suddenly back there again,” he writes. “The heart is happy but not whole. It has done battle with death and lives with the scars.” Gupta goes on to reflect, “This has given me a new frame for reading the Bible, an emotional lens.” In particular, he explores how Jesus’ suffering on the cross impacts him differently now.
We each journey through different losses and sorrows—and, thanks be to God, those griefs can serve as a lens through which we view the Passion and Easter story. You may be grieving miscarriage or infertility; the death of a parent, grandparent, or child; the illness a friend, neighbor, or coworker is currently facing. Or perhaps it is a different sort of grief: a hurting marriage, a broken relationship, a prodigal child. Whatever that sorrow is, we can bring it to the man of sorrows who is well acquianted with grief. Gupta reflects, in his piece, that God’s “heart breaks over and over for all the pain and tears shed in the world. We might theologically refer to his sacrifice as ‘once for all’ (Heb. 7:27), but we also have to believe God lives with the eternal memory of the hurts and sorrows.” Even as we live in the joy of the Resurrection, we also rejoice in the persistent hope we have in sorrow: the victorious and risen Christ is with us always.
