Parkland – Good Friday all over again

We’re heading into Holy Week, and I’m bracing myself for the roller coaster ride of emotions that always accompany the rhythm of beautifully planned worship. I have always been disappointed that so many people find Good Friday too hard. They stay away, preferring to celebrate Palm Sunday’s excitement and return to church on Easter Sunday. “See through the pain. Confront realities. Stay present and look death in the face.” That’s been my mantra for years.

So I prepare for the sadness as we remember a death so many centuries ago that has eternal significance.

This morning I opened up my phone to read a New York Times article – “Something about Parkland has  been different” by Jonah Engel Bromwich. It’s another background piece of writing ahead of the student demonstrations planned for Saturday as teenagers rally to ask grown-ups to grow up about gun control.

What Bromwich does is like going to Good Friday services for sixty years. In story after story he simply relates the experiences of survivors – children, teachers, and parents  whose children have been shot. Each story is brief, but it carries not only the story of the day but each person’s struggle to come to terms with its meaning. It’s calmly relentless writing. Each story speaks of the returning horror when there is yet another massacre and the losses re-surface. These people are not angry, so much as beaten. They watch the Parkland developments with intensity. Some of them are joining in. Some say, “Perhaps they’ll succeed where we could not.”

I scroll down the page, and the next suggested articles are about eating fat and losing weight and the secrets of the countries where people live the longest. There are always escapes from empathy and change-making. I wonder what the youthful Parkland activists think about our pre-occupations.

Easter Sunday is the salve for the pain of Good Friday. Christians might do well to hold off celebrating the resurrection glibly ’til we have looked contemporary violence in the face and wept. And gathered courage.

We need more leaders who in humility ride into Jerusalem knowing just how much it is going to cost.

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