Good Friday Grief

Our observance of Good Friday brings us into the reality of grief. Through the Good Friday liturgy, we deepen our sense of Jesus’s suffering and of the profound grief of his mother and his followers. Jesus’s trial and crucifixion happened long ago and far away, but because Jesus is for us a very real presence whom we name as both Lord and friend, the story touches us deeply.

Often as we allow ourselves to enter into the story and share in the grief of his followers who witnessed this event firsthand, we find ourselves connecting this deep, cosmic grief — our sorrow at the brutality that nailed God Incarnate to a cross — to our own personal experiences of loss and grief. Sometimes we experience a connection with a familiar grief around the death of a loved one, while other times we are surprised by what surfaces. Sometimes we find ourselves consciously grieving a loss we had kept at arm’s length, something we weren’t even conscious that we were grieving. 

Some of us are conscious of our grief around the losses of life and place connected to climate change. Psychologists are aware of a growing number of people experiencing grief connected to climate change. The combination of species extinction with the loss of human lives to climate-related floods, storms, and fires is layered in with all the other global concerns that are connected with grief: the pandemic, the loss of life and the lack of humanity in Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine, gun violence here in the United States. 

I know that few people I’ve talked to since the most recent UN IPCC working group report came out have heard anything about it, and I’ve noticed that the floods in South Africa — the result of the “deadliest storm on record” in South Africa — haven’t received much coverage in the United States. However, since the same global changes that contribute to the large-scale catastrophes being experienced now and forecast to occur in the future to some degree — depending on how well we respond to the warnings in the IPCC reports — also contribute to changes close to home, I expect there is some degree of awareness even if we ignore the bigger picture when the seasons seem “off” or the weather seems “really strange”. 

Good Friday focuses on Jesus’s death on the cross. The full meaning of the Easter message of hope, of love having the final word, depends on Jesus death being real. If we try to deny his death on the cross, the Easter message is diminished. Good Friday invites us to experience our grief so that we might fully live into the salvation story we proclaim at Easter.

Acceptance of the realities that bring grief near is a necessary part of healing. Certainly we will not begin to heal our biosphere until enough people feel the grief of what we are losing. For me, and I suspect for others who pay attention to climate change, the death of Jesus on the cross is connected with the unnecessary deaths resulting from catastrophic events related to floods, storms, drought, and melting ice, with the loss of entire species, and the loss of places and nuances of seasons that will never again be the same in our lifetimes. Good Friday teaches us that we can somehow bear the grief, that it’s okay to open our eyes and see the reality all around us.