The church year · Holy Week · Palm Sunday through Holy Saturday
You prayed and the answer was silence. Jesus knows that night.
Holy Week walks with Jesus from the cheering crowds to the garden, the cross, and the quiet tomb. God came all the way down into suffering and abandonment.
Someone you love is gone, or sick, or far away, and you asked God to change it. You asked a hundred times. The heavens felt like a closed door. Maybe you’re afraid to say how angry or empty you are. This week, you don’t have to pretend. Jesus prayed this kind of prayer too.
Fellow travelers
We aren’t the first to walk this way.
- Jesus in Gethsemane fell on his face and asked, “May this cup be taken from me” (Matt 26:36–39). The cup stayed.
- The disciples couldn’t stay awake an hour with him in his grief (Matt 26:40). Even friends fall asleep.
- The women stood at the cross watching from a distance, unable to do anything but stay (Matt 27:55–56).
- Joseph of Arimathea asked for the body and laid it in his own tomb. Love sometimes looks like a burial (Matt 27:57–60).
The cross means that even when you feel forsaken, you are not alone, because God himself has been there.
Where the Shepherd meets us
The destination of every season is the same: God himself.
- On the cross Jesus prayed the psalm of the abandoned: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Ps 22:1). Your question is allowed. He asked it first.
- The same psalm goes on to say God “has not hidden his face” from the afflicted (Ps 22:24).
- He is a man of sorrows, familiar with grief. Surely he took up our pain (Isa 53:3–4).
- “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). He didn’t send help from far away. He came and stayed.
On Good Friday, read Ps 22 aloud slowly. Pray the verses that feel true and simply sit with the ones that don’t yet.
Keep walking
- Grief
- Us with God and Suffering
- Us with God and Heaviness
- The Calendarthe whole year at a glance