Dawn is Coming

By Karly Noelle Abreu White

“Today is Friday. But Sunday is coming.”  I first saw these words posted on a Good Friday and they made me tear up. So much of our world feels like an eternal good Friday. Or to use the metaphor Lewis used in his Narnia chronicles: an endless winter never punctuated by a Christmas. Lent is a strange time, running somehow parallel or perhaps perpendicular to advent: a holy waiting, the world holding its breath. 

The Christmas Eve service often goes like this: the lighting of the advent candles brightening the room until all is light. 

The Good Friday service is the reverse of that, the snuffing out of lights, the darkening of rooms. 

Life is full of tragedy and hopelessness. On Good Friday, I can imagine the heartbreak on the faces of the disciples and friends of Jesus. How their hopes had died. How they’d watched someone they loved more than anything be tortured and die an ignoble, horrific, public death. His dignity stripped. His flesh disturbingly and finally human. He cried at the end. He bled. He sweated. Thirsted. Water poured out of him, as it does from all of us in the end. 

Everyone kept vigil until their eyes stung, until the body was taken down and placed in a tomb that belonged to someone else. Then they went home, rubbing their arms against the morning chill, unable to speak. Perhaps they laid in the bed a long while the next day, the grief falling on them like stones too heavy to roll away. 

There would never be another good day, they must have thought. The light had left the world, and it was all the darker for having come into contact with it. 

But Sunday was coming.