Suggested Readings: Isaiah 53:13-53, 12, Psalm 22, Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9, John 18:1-19:42
“All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”-Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
Last fall, it felt like the world was on fire. Every time I turned on the news or picked up my phone the stories all seemed to be about violence, war, unrest, discontent, and uncertainty. My social media feed was full of tragedy and injustice. Our community experienced incredible loss. And so I found myself frustrated when the above quote from Julian of Norwich, a 14th century Christian Mystic, showed up with great regularity on Instagram memes and calligraphed water bottle stickers. How could people so blithely proclaim that all would be well when it seemed to me that the world was falling apart?
Out of that question I turned to Norwich’s work from which that quote is taken, Revelations of Divine Love. Written from visions she experienced on what she thought would be her deathbed, this work talks about the centrality of Christ’s passion, to understanding the human life which is so often lived in the midst of tragedy, suffering, and death. Were it not for the events of Good Friday that our texts today tell about and point to, we would have no choice but to lose ourselves to despair about our lives and the life of the world. But in Christ’s death, suffering and death of every kind have been subsumed and the world was changed.
It would be easier, perhaps, to skip over the difficulty of Good Friday and the grief of Jesus’ death straight to the hope and joy of Easter Sunday. Just as it would make life seem easier if we turned our eyes away from suffering and pain. Instead, we stop here each year because it is a reminder for us that God knows suffering, God knows pain, God knows death. We stop because it is a reminder that when we experience those things in our own lives we are not alone. We stop when it seems as though the world is on fire because we know that God is there, at work, even in the midst of tragedy and injustice. In the cross, God is at work redeeming and restoring the whole of the human experience, the good parts and the bad. We stop on this day and affirm that indeed “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Heather Gerbsch Daughtery
