"It Is Finished."
Jesus spoke these words through parched lips, his body broken by the hands of men. As he closed his eyes in surrender, darkness eclipsed the sky.
An eerie stillness settled over his friends and family who watched from a distance, because while they had been with Jesus, they could not see the Story beyond his final breath.
“It is finished” felt like an end.
It’s hard for me to sit in that darkness, to imagine what it must have been like not to know that Light would emerge three days later. To feel the void caused by Jesus’ absence without hope of his return. The heaviness is unsettling at best.
But then I remember: death must come before resurrection. We feel the hopelessness of Good Friday so that when Easter morning comes, we cannot deny our ache for redemption, for a life saturated with the presence of God. We gulp from the cup of communion because our dry and weary tongues are parched for his presence.
And so today, we sit with our longing. Our questions. Our uncertainty, our fears, and our frailty. We acknowledge our inability to see what comes next.
Because “it is finished” is not an end, but an opening—an invitation to let the pain of death lead us into a new kind of life.