Good Friday Grief

Sometimes grief has a way of making us feel like we’re doing faith wrong, especially when we can’t “move on” or wrap our pain easily. On Good Friday, refuse to rush. Sit at the cross and let what is heavy be heavy, making space for the losses that can be named and the quiet ache that cannot. 

Start at a tomb in John 11, where the shortest line in Scripture becomes a lifeline: "Jesus wept". Not a polite tear, but real mourning. That moment reshapes Christian grief and pastoral care because it shows a God who does not stand far off from suffering. From there, move to the crucifixion and listen to Jesus pray Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Lament is in no way rebellion. It’s a spiritual message of telling the truth in God’s presence. The cross becomes the safest place to bring your questions, your anger, your tears, and your exhaustion. 

Then, Holy Saturday, the in-between space after devastation and before any sense of resurrection, when time feels strange and comfort feels delayed. If you’re there right now, you’re not falling behind. Grief does not run on a schedule, and Jesus’ blessing over mourners makes room for slow healing. 

Take a quiet moment, name what you’re carrying, and place it at the foot of the cross. 

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE :  candeelucas@soulplusgrace.com

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Transcript

Welcome To Good Friday Grief

Candee 0:28

Welcome to Solace: G grief. I'm glad you're here. Today is Good Friday. So please sit back and listen to this meditation regarding God's presence in grief on Good Friday. Good Friday is the one day of the year when the church does not rush past pain. Most of our days, most of our services are tilted toward resolution, toward answers, toward the hopeful note at the end, but not today. Today we stand at the cross and we allow what is heavy to simply be heavy. I want to begin by naming something that most of us carry but rarely say out loud in church. Grief. Grief. Maybe your grief has a name. A person you've lost, a relationship that ended, a dream that didn't survive, a diagnosis, a disappointment so deep it changed who you are. Maybe your grief is harder to name. It's the low hum of loss beneath ordinary life. The quiet ache of things not being as they should. Whatever your grief, you are welcome to bring it here today. Because Good Friday is, among other things, the day God said,-- I see it, I know it, I have entered it.-- Before we come to the cross, I want to take us to a graveside. In John chapter 11, Jesus receives word that his friend Lazarus has died. He travels to Bethany. Mary, Lazarus' sister, falls at his feet weeping. The crowd around her is weeping. And then we read two of the most startling words in all of Scripture. --Jesus wept--. This is not a polite tear. The Greek is more visceral. He was 'deeply moved, troubled in spirit, groaning and mourning within himself'. The Son of God, who knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, still wept. Why? He could have walked in serenely, knowing the ending, but he didn't. He entered the grief of the moment. He let it land. He wept with the others who wept. This tells us something profound. God is not distant from our sorrow. He is not up in heaven clicking through to the next slide, waiting for us to get to the resurrection bit. He stops. He grieves. He is, as Isaiah put it, --a man of sorrows--, acquainted with grief. For Isaiah tells us, he was despised and rejected, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Familiar with pain. That phrase should not stop us. The God of the universe knows grief from the inside, not as a theory, not as a distance, as lived experience. Your grief does not make you less faithful. It makes you more like Jesus. Now we come to the cross itself. Crucifixion was designed to be as public and degrading as possible. It was the Roman Empire's way of saying, this person is nothing. Their suffering is on display for the crowd's entertainment. But I want us to listen to what Jesus said from the cross because it is astonishing. Matthew 27 tells us, --My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?-- These are the opening words of Psalm 22, an ancient Hebrew lament. Jesus in his agony reaches for the language of lament. He cries out in abandonment. He uses the Psalms the way they were always intended to, to bring raw, unedited human anguish before God. This is not a failure of faith. This is faith at its most honest. The Psalms are full of this. Roughly a third of the Psalter is lament. --How long, O Lord, where are you? Why have you hidden your face?-- God put that language in Scripture because He expects us to use it. The cross is then the ultimate lament. God in flesh crying out in desolation, which means, and this is the heart of what I want to say today, the cross is the safest place in the universe to bring your grief. You will not shock God with your pain. You will not offend him with your questions. You will not push him away with your anger or your tears. He's been there all along. He has said it to himself. My God, my God, why? When you bring your grief to the cross, you are not interrupting the story. You are standing exactly where the story is. Here is something I want to say carefully, because I think the church sometimes gets it wrong. We want to get to Sunday. We want to get to Sunday, to the resurrection, to the part where it's all okay. Then the resurrection is real and it matters, and we will get there. But today is Friday, and tomorrow is Saturday. The day the disciples sat in the silence of crushed hopes. They didn't know that Sunday was coming. They just knew their rabbi and teacher was dead and that their world had ended. For many of us, grief feels like Holy Saturday. It's after the devastating loss and before any sense of resurrection. It's the in-between, the waiting, the not knowing. Or as the Buddhists describe it, the Bardo. And I want to say to anyone who is in Holy Saturday right now, you are not failing, you are not falling behind. Grief does not run on a schedule. Matthew tells us in chapter five, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, for they will be comforted. Jesus didn't say, Blessed are those who mourn. Briefly, and then get over it. He just said, Blessed are those who mourn. The mourning itself is not the problem. It is in fact a posture that opens us to comfort. The Christian hope is not the grief. The Christian hope is not that grief is wrong, but that grief is not the last word. There is Sunday. There is a resurrection. There is a morning coming when every tear will be wiped away. But that promise does not skip over the Friday and the Saturday. It passes through them. God does not demand that we perform being okay when we don't feel okay. He meets us exactly, precisely where we are. As we close, I want to invite you to do something. In a moment, we're going to have a time of quiet or prayer. And I want to invite you to do one thing in your heart. Name your grief and bring it here. Not to have it fixed, not to be told it doesn't matter, but to lay it at the foot of the cross, where the God who wept and the God who cried out in desolation will receive it. There is a very old Christian practice of bringing your grief to God as an act of trust. Not saying everything is fine, but instead I don't understand this. And it hurts. Not triumphant, not performative, just honest and present, and leaning into a God who has never asked us to grieve alone. Because he cares for us. He cares for you. That is why the cross happened, not as an afterthought, not as a plan B, but as and because the end of love, when it meets a broken world, goes all the way in. Remember, whatever you are carrying today, you do not carry it alone.