Newsletter Vol. 1 Issue 27

Read Ahead:  John 19: 31-42

Lamenting Racial Injustice

Meditation: 20-30 minutes 

What might it have been like to be the women who had waited at the cross watching Jesus die a slow excruciating death? How about John, the disciple, who stayed with them, and cared for them once Jesus had died? How did he feel? How did he make sense of the violence in front of him?

What might it felt like to journey with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus to the tomb to lay the now dead Jesus down and say goodbye, thinking this was the end? How long did they linger? What emotions stayed with them as they slowly returned home, now with a deep hole in their hearts?

We might ask ourselves how we make sense of senseless loss when we are confronted with it. In our society today, so many people of color attempt to make sense of the ways in which death occurs, whether literal or figurative. How do mothers like Sybrina Fulton mourn the loss of her son Trayvon Martin? How do Asian American and Pacific Islanders make sense of the violence thrust upon them because of lies from the pandemic? How do Indigenous peoples continue to grapple with being erased from American history? How do Latinos deal with racist slurs and hold the pain that comes with watching others have their children separated from them at the border?

Our tradition, stemming back to the Psalms, calls us to lament these injustices. Sometimes all we can do is turn our laments over to God – to declare our complaints, feel our pains, and tell everything to God asking for God to take it and make it anew. Perhaps that is what Mary did that night or the next night – lamenting and crying out to her God who brought life into the world through her only son to watch him be executed because of his Gospel message. Perhaps the other women, faithfully returning with spices, did what they could because their hearts were bursting open in pain. And in his own way, maybe Jesus, dead in the tomb, knew deep down because he had mourned the loss of his friend Lazarus, and he wept when he saw the pain his friends and their community endured.

Holy Saturday is a day to keep vigil and lament the loss that seems to make no sense. It is a day to feel everything – to feel how we have been wronged, and how Christ, suffering in the peoples of today who have been wronged through all the forms of racism. It is a day to pause, to reflect deeply, to feel deeply, to remember deeply, and to lament deeply. It is a day of reckoning – of asking when and how God will be victorious, not knowing if that day is soon or far away.
 

Resource: “O God, Will You Restore Us?”

Questions for Reflection: