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Twelve months ago I lost a close friend to brain cancer. He was 53 years old and survived two years after the initial shock of the diagnosis. For about 18 months of that time, with chemo and radiotherapy holding the tumour at bay, he was fit and strong and we surfed together, attended footy matches and had family get-togethers. It was hard to accept he was actually dying.
But once treatment came to an end, his demise was rapid. The last months were excruciating for him and his family, the final weeks unspeakably sad. It was confronting to witness how death took hold of him as we watched him fade away. The last time I saw him, struggling to stay awake and clearly in much discomfort, he thanked me for coming and said he expected to be “much improved the next time I see you”. It was a joke. His last one to me.
Last weekend his wife and four kids scattered his ashes at one of his favourite beaches in Sydney. His ashes! I can still hardly believe it. I’ve been thinking a lot about him with the first anniversary of his death leading into the Easter weekend. I’ve pondered the hope that the Easter story is supposed to offer and whether it really has anything to say to such dreadful sadness and loss.
I have always found the rhythm of the Easter weekend profoundly comforting, and a big part of that is how the Easter story faces into the darkness. It doesn’t skirt around it. A traditional Good Friday is a very sombre affair, focusing as it does on the suffering of Christ. The story of the crucifixion speaks to universal human experiences of betrayal, injustice, violence, heartbreak and loss. Jesus’s cry from the cross – “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” – expresses a desolation that all of us feel at some point in our lives.
But the darkness of Good Friday is a necessary precursor to the journey towards the light of Easter Sunday. In very important ways, this narrative arc is reflective of, and essential to, the experience of those who take comfort from the story.
The crucifixion represents a cruel, shameful and agonising physical death. But even more significant is the claim that it is God himself in human form being subjected to this trauma. He is identifying with the human struggle to such a degree that he literally becomes part of it. The potency of the story lies in the sense that, then and now, as we experience the sometimes devastating travails of human existence, God himself suffers with us.
The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann was just 16 years old when he was drafted into the German army in 1943. He served in an anti-aircraft battery in Hamburg as it was pounded by British bombing, destroying the city and killing 40,000 people – including the friend who was standing next to him.
Moltmann spent three years in prisoner of war camps before returning to Germany “shattered and broken”. It was being introduced to the concept of the suffering God that brought him to faith. “A theology which did not speak of God [as] the One who was abandoned and crucified would have had nothing to say to us then,” he wrote.
The celebrations of Easter do of course, take a turn, and come Easter Sunday there is reason for a surprising joy: death is reversed, the desolate one resurrected. If the cross is the symbol of divine suffering, the empty tomb offers a vision of death defeated, and hope and life springing out of arid ground.
When I said goodbye to my dying friend for the last time and he spoke about being on the mend at our next meeting he was joking. But on reflection, there was a serious point to be made too, because he believed in the promise of the resurrection and of restoration in a new life beyond this one.
While death hangs like a shadow over us all, the notion of resurrection has been, for 2,000 years, a reason to look at all of existence and see not random chaos but a grand narrative of meaning and purpose.
That narrative is summed up by the British writer Francis Spufford like this: “Far more can be mended than you know.” In other words, the claim of Easter is the resurrection marked a cosmos-altering event that changes everything, now and into the future, where everything that damages, spoils and limits life – including our death – will be overcome.
It offers hope for broken bodies to be restored. For reunion with those we have lost. For injustice to be overcome, loneliness and heartbreak to be forgotten, and all that distorts and destroys life to be made untrue.
As such, the events of Easter, ancient as they are, continue to be a reason to tenaciously face the joys and sorrows of life and not give in to despair, no matter your situation. Even if you find yourself having to say goodbye to a much loved friend, one so full of life.
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Simon Smart is the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity
