Daily Devotion 11 April 2020

Create a peaceful space to pause, and allow yourself to feel God’s presence alongside you, as near to you as your own breath. In following the reflection below, as a church we will draw closer to God and to one another as we grow in faith and deepen our sense of belonging to God.

We come through the challenges of Holy Week and the sorrow and agony of Good Friday in the knowledge that the joy of Easter is approaching. Without knowing what lay ahead, what must it have been like for Jesus’s closest friends for whom the crucifixion was death – the death of their hopes, the death of all their plans and dreams, and worst of all, the death of their beloved Lord?

Some years ago, I tried to imagine myself back on that Saturday and this is how it seemed to me it might have felt for one of them, Martha of Bethany:

I didn’t realise there was so little time, you see.
I thought we’d have Jesus for ever.
Oh, I know he wasn’t here very often, but there was always a next time – and now there isn’t. Mary used to tell me, “Come and listen to him, Martha, come and draw in life from him”. But I’d get grumpy and say, someone’s got to get the next meal… and she’d say, “he’d rather see you!” And there was always the next time. Now it’s too late. There’s no next time.
I have this huge empty hole inside me, this ache, this pain, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Mary says I’d feel better if I went and helped her in the kitchen – but now it doesn’t matter anymore how long I stay in there; I just can’t settle to anything.
Jesus brought our brother back from the dead – and I thought then that nothing could ever go wrong again. Such joy! Such faith!
Now Jesus is dead.
There’s nothing left but pain and emptiness.

Reflection © 2020 Rev. Ann Caffyn.
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