When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.
When I would awaken in the middle of the night, I frequently felt disoriented and drenched in darkness. Floundering for light, I felt like I was drowning. My eyes would open wide to find a flicker of illumination and I’d frantically reach out for something familiar to ground me.
This childhood sensation of feeling helpless in the dark is what it feels like to grieve.
As a child, my fear of the dark sparked a claustrophobic reaction. Like being buried alive or finding myself at the bottom of a deep and menacing ocean of night, I would feel an overwhelming sense of panic in the dark.
Further accelerating my terror, I could never manufacture a light to help me see. Crying out for help, one of my parents would come to my rescue as I desperately fought to breathe.
Yes, this is what it feels like to grieve. Inescapable, dreadful, and wrenching, grief smothers. The shock of loss pulses like a throbbing pain that we can’t stop. Panicked by what is happening, we’ll cry out for our parents—or for anyone, really—to awaken us from the nightmare. Sometimes they come to our side. Sometimes they don’t.
The Bible teaches us that Jesus experienced death. The Gospels detail his brutal, violent passing and the slow ebb of acceptance that dawned on the few followers who were there to place him in a tomb.
Immersed in the void of death, Jesus was dead in a tomb for three days. Jesus’s friends and followers were left to grieve the loss of their Lord and leader in those terrible days. As modern readers of this story, we are comforted to know that the story does not end with Jesus’s lifeless body. But Jesus’s disciples didn’t know what we know—that the moments of grief that they were experiencing had a shelf-life. The terror that they felt would not be their forever home. Light would break out and scatter the darkness.
But why three days? Why did Jesus have to be dead for that period of time?
I can appreciate how and why Jesus died. Although the idea of substitutionary atonement (that is, how Jesus took on our sins and died for us so that we could be saved) has been debated among theologians for centuries, I feel comfortable in stating that Jesus’s death was necessary for us to experience redemption and resurrection, ourselves. But couldn’t Jesus have been raised soon after his death? Couldn’t his glory have eclipsed the darkness sooner rather than later?
I suppose that it can be argued that for the disciples and their context, three days wasn’t that long of a season. Perhaps. But that may be a reach. When you lose someone you love, time loses its meaning and can feel interminable.
Grief feels much more like a seasonal affective disorder than it does a momentary affliction. A season of loss arrives uninvited, settles in for sleepless nights and tearful days. Like the weather, grief changes. It moderates. But whether that season is months or years long, grief alters the landscape, like the spring storms and autumnal hurricanes.
In my own experience, I’ve learned that grief must be weathered and outlasted. Yes, I find it comforting to know that I’m not alone in the darkness. And yes, I know that I will one day feel differently about the loss I’ve experienced. Still, grief feels like I’m locked in a tomb and that Jesus is but a corpse beside me.
The Good News is that Jesus doesn’t stay dead. The Good News is that the stone that sealed the tomb is rolled away. The Good News is that God’s glorious light scatters the darkness. The Good News is that I can walk out of the tomb myself and experience being raised from the kind of death I’d been feeling.
I know that this doesn’t eliminate our experience of grief. But this Good News certainly helps me know that because of Christ Jesus, I will outlast it. And so will you.