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Pondering Good Friday's Message in the Time of COVID-19
An unimagined future and the hope it can bring.
Posted April 10, 2020 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Today, Christians honour Good Friday, the day the Chief Priests delivered Jesus to the Romans for torture and death on their efficiently effective killing machine. The week that had begun in crowds celebrating Jesus ended in his betrayal and aloneness on a crude wooden cross. Such a ruthless change from the crowds celebrating him to cheering his crucifixion surprised all but Jesus. Brain injury is like that for each individual who suffers from it. Work, relationships, play are progressing in their expected way when a car crash, a sudden hemorrhage, a stroke destructs their brain and every part of their life. Often, people turn on them, too, with confusing suddenness. The injured die to who they were. Today, COVID-19 feels the same to many.
When Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life, he was in part showing a truth and a way for how humans live and die.
The truth is life ends without warning and we don’t understand until that end that life is more than the physical body. The truth is that one can die while still walking and talking. The truth is that even those who can foresee a car crash or pandemics cannot imagine the finality that both bring. Brain injury ends one’s daily routine. It ends dreams; it ends talents; it ends relationships. COVID-19 has ended daily routines; it’s ended dreams as envisioned before physical distancing and self-isolation mandated separation from all but those people live with (if they live with anyone); it’s not ended talents but it’s ended the way people can use those talents.
Jesus knew what was coming; he prayed so hard for the Father to spare him torture and death that he sweated blood. But he didn’t seek a way to avoid it. Instead, his way was to continue on because he knew his way journeyed on beyond betrayal, abandonment, and death by crucifixion.
“After being made alive, [Jesus] went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.” 1 Peter 3:19-20
Jesus’s way allowed him to visit the worst. What did he say? It’s unknown. But the Gospels teach that Jesus’s way was to speak hope, to declare he was bringing living water to the lonely, the sick, the blind, the lame, the outcasts, the shunned, the rich, the poor, to anyone who asked.
While he visited the imprisoned, humans mourned. They cloistered themselves, afraid and bereft. Hope vanished from their minds. Similarly, brain injury leaves the sufferer cloistered from others, afraid, confused, and too often bereft of the love and support they were accustomed to in the vital times before their injury. COVID-19 has crucified the normal way of life for everyone; people are struggling with fear, cloistered in their homes, and grieving the death of their expected way of life. Where is hope?
The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter is usually considered one of waiting for the good message of Jesus standing up in his resurrected body and declaring new life. But when Jesus was killed, around 30 to 36 AD, the women waited only to attend to his forever dead body, and all expected to resume their old lives. Humans have a tendency to return to the past. Jesus’s way is to continue toward life, to teach his followers how to embrace hope in devastation and to welcome an unimagined life.
The problem with the accepted brain injury way is that hope lies within the medical community that limits their healing to what was known, not what is known; hope lies in returning to relationships as they had been pre-injury. But when Jesus appeared to first the women and then his male disciples, he didn’t resume their relationships as they had been; like an earthquake he shook them out of their pasts and into an unimagined future. He didn’t simply forgive them; he reconciled with them. He led them into a profoundly different way of thinking. His way empowered them. Jesus creates new kinds of daily routines, provides new dreams, exposes talents heretofore unseen, for he teaches, leads, and accompanies people along rocky, rewarding roads.
As people isolated by COVID-19 ponder the devastation all around, do they also think about how brain injury and subsequent abandonment isolated their friends, family, neighbours, and colleagues? As people grieve their dreams, do they perceive for the first time how devastating it must’ve been for their injured loved ones to lose theirs? As people ruminate on how to use their talents in a virtual world, do they perceive how their denial of virtual options imprisoned their injured loved ones’ talents?
As Christians reflect on Good Friday and the death of what was known and then expand their gaze to the many who were devastated, isolated, and imprisoned by brain injury, they may see how the injured found a way towards hope and a life that at times rewards. Yet without reconciliation, the new way isn’t complete. Few have Jesus’s power to move people towards looking inwards, and brain injury would hobble what little power a person could have.
Jesus said about the crowds who’d turned on him, like so many turn on those with brain injury, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Luke 23:24.
Perhaps this COVID-19 Good Friday is an opportunity to follow Jesus’s way. Perhaps it’s a time to reach out to the injured and ask for mercy, understanding that forgiveness alone isn’t enough. The cross alone isn’t enough. It’s following on to the resurrection and its message of new life and reconciliation that matters.
Copyright ©2020 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy. May not be reprinted or reposted without permission.
