Last night I cooked. As day deepened into darkness, I stood wrapped in an apron my mother made, grinding almonds, rolling out dough, chopping potatoes and onions, washing lettuce, slicing strawberries, blending whipped cream and cream cheese and sugar. I cooked until I was cranky, and then I kept cooking (Josh learned to keep his distance). I was preparing for the feast, but this preparation struck me as strange: how does one live into the joy of Easter in the mid-time mourning space of Holy Saturday?

In the church calendar, Good Friday may be the darkest day, but the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is for me a day of profound mystery. It bespeaks the waiting I often feel within myself, the tentative question: what next? I am preparing, I am mourning, I am hoping. For Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the other women who found his tomb empty early Sunday morning, Saturday would have been a Sabbath day. Would they have lit candles or lamps? What wailing would their mourning have entailed? They certainly weren’t preparing to celebrate; they weren’t peeling vegetables and drizzling honey. They weren’t wrapping their hair on strips of cloth to make spring Sunday curls.

But my experience of Easter happens now, with Bibles tucked on my numerous bookshelves telling me very little about Saturday but that by Sunday morning those women knew, as perplexed and afraid and astonished as they may have been, that there is such a thing as life out of death. That there was such a thing as a temple rebuilt in three days, One come to suffer with, to give his life a ransom for many, to vanquish death and evil in the most flip-flopped, unexpected way. Like a bulb planted in the earth–you look at it, and you think, how could this shrivelled brown ball ever make something beautiful? (How could this submissive, shameful death ever make something beautiful?) And then: life!

Life!

So I prepared my feast. I assembled friends to share the feast–as one of them called it, a “resurrection family.” I followed the recipes my mom and aunts taught me by many years of example. And after a night of deep sleep, I awoke to Life. (Let’s also be less romanticized and more honest: this morning I drank copious quantities of coffee and ate pastry and haphazardly hacked a nine-pound ham with a meat cleaver so that at least part of it would fit into a slow cooker.) Leaving the ham, Josh and I strolled two blocks to gather with the most beautiful collection of Christians I’ve ever witnessed. And we celebrated. After the darkness of Friday and Saturday, all I could see this morning was Light. All I could hear was Joy. All I could feel was Hope.

And then we ate. We ate in the sort of way where laughter ripples along the table, where forkfuls of avocado-lime pie pause in midair as people discover surprise connections, shared hopes. I took photos of us all and sent them to the family back home, where a similar feast had taken place, with a similar menu, also made ready by hands on that mysterious Saturday of waiting and preparation.

Tomorrow morning I will awaken to a day like most days, which at least for me are much more like Holy Saturday–the bridge between pain and beauty, death and life, looking back and looking ahead–than either Good Friday or Easter Sunday. I have hope and I have questions. I have sorrow and I have joy. I live in neither fast nor feast, but moderation, small happinesses. But my red-stained fingers, dyed brighter than the eggs I will now make into egg-salad, will remind me: we have fasted, and we have feasted. We have layered our laughter and tasted of life’s delight in special food and special friends. We live not just in the shadow of death but in the light of a Risen Son.

Cindy Wallace is a graduate student, a recovering fundamentalist, and a church-planting plotter with her red-goateed seminarian husband. This post originally appeared at her blog http://lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com/.

“Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” John 19:28-30 [NIV]

Today the man who knew me best in the world died. It was a cruel death – brutal, painful – and part of me has wished, over and over, that I had never heard that Jesus would be in Jerusalem. That I had never set out on my pilgrimage to see him, to tell him how he had changed my life. And then when I arrived, when I learned that he had been taken, that he would be executed, why did I stay? I suppose, though I am just a woman, and a Samaritan at that, I wanted to be his witness. And perhaps – I wanted to see a miracle. I hoped that finally he would reveal himself in all of his power. Instead I saw a man, ripped, pierced, suffering – who wants to see their beloved in such agony?

I don’t know if he saw me. To be honest, I don’t KNOW if he would remember me. We only met once, and our time together was very, very short. So you may think I’m crazy when I tell you this, but… I think he spoke to me. From the cross, I mean. The time was growing short – I could tell he was getting weaker – his breathing was so shallow and labored. But then, suddenly, with a great effort he pulled up his head, looked right into my eyes, and cried, so clearly, “I thirst.”

Immediately, I found myself back by that well in the scorching heat of the noon-day sun. No one would come to draw water at that time if they had a choice – but I didn’t. The other women of the village had made that clear. When a strange, dusty man asked me for a drink, all of my defenses went up. In my experience, men who talked to me – well, they weren’t really interested in conversation. And this man was clearly a Jew – a fact I reminded him of sharply as I turned away.

When he answered me, I thought at first he babbled like a fool. For one who moved with such quiet confidence, his words were strange. “If you knew the gift of God,” he said, “and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” I confess, I mocked him to his face – how will you draw this water? Are you truly so great – you can do this without a bucket? But his next words and the knowingness of his gaze caught me. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,” he said, “but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

To be honest, I still didn’t understand exactly what he was offering – I just knew I wanted it. Never to make the hot, humiliating, lonely mid-day trek to the well again – and maybe – something more. Something in me was drawing toward this man – but then he asked me to bring my husband to him. All of the old wounds re-surfaced, and I covered them with a polite lie. It didn’t work. He knew my entire ugly history – and, the most shocking thing was, I saw compassion rather than judgment in his eyes.

I tried just once more to hold him at bay – in a perverse way, I wanted him to remember that he was supposed to look down on me, like everyone else did. He just smiled at me in a way that seemed to recognize me as one of his own. “A time is coming,” he said, “and has now come when the true worshippers [‘when you,’ my heart whispered] will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers that the Father seeks.”

Could it be? I finally drew close to him, saying with hesitant wonder, “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” He knew what I was asking. “I, the one speaking to you – I am he.”

His friends were uncomfortable when they returned to find us talking, so close together. I didn’t stay long – I needed to go anyway, to tell the others of my village, whether they would believe me or not – and as I ran away, I heard his friends urging him to eat. “My food,” he replied, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

This is the man who changed my life – the one I heard cry out on the cross, “I thirst,” just moments before it was finished. You may find the words unremarkable – he was a man, after all. I know – I saw him, I even touched him – and men, especially men suffering as he did, thirst. But he looked at me as he said it, and I wonder if he wasn’t talking about something more. If he wasn’t reminding me once again to look more carefully, below the surface, beyond the obvious physical realities. I think he was talking about the desire of his heart and asking me once again to share a drink with him, this time from a much deeper well.

He hungered to do the will of his Father – wasn’t he thirsty for that as well? He offered me living water, a cooling draft that would draw me into the arms of his Father, the life of his Father – as he hung there, so very alone on that cross, didn’t he long for that as well? I am sure that many, more learned than I, will offer theories about which words of Scripture Jesus fulfilled today. They will offer scholarly proofs and persuasive commentary. All I can tell you is that as he spoke, my heart instinctively cried back in the words of the Psalmist: “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul pants for you… My soul thirsts for God, for the living God… When can I go and meet with God?”

Do you know what the soldiers offered Jesus in response to his cry of thirst? Vinegar. Rank, sour, disgusting… As angry as I am at that memory, do you know what I offered him that day so long ago? Essentially, the same thing. I never did draw him water, but I drenched him with my anger, my pain, my sin. And just like the vinegar, he took it and drank. Then he held out a cool cup brimming with forgiveness and new life.

I am told that on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took a cup of wine, and told his friends, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” He takes our sin – and he offers us so much more in return. Nothing less than complete acceptance, total forgiveness, full restoration to life in the Spirit. It is a mystery, and I am only a woman, and a Samaritan at that – but this is what I have seen, this is what I have heard.

Brenna blogs at http://www.purpleforparenting.net/.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it really means to be a Christian, and about the challenges of being or calling oneself a Christian in American society. As a missionary kid in Liberia, I had friends from many different nations, cultures, and faiths, and was faced early with the fact that many good, devout people believed very differently than I did. The sincerity and devotion of my Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain friends challenged me. They held tight to the doctrines they were taught from infancy, lived out their faith in the ways prescribed by their sacred books and cultures.

I couldn’t help but wonder, was I any different? I had been born to Christian parents in the backwoods of Wisconsin, and I believed in Jesus with all my heart. But if I had been born in Taiwan, like my friend Yu-San, would I be a Buddhist? If I had been born in the Cameroon, like my friend Mohammed, would I be a Muslim?

The answer made me uncomfortable. I figured that if I was going to ask Yu-San or Mohammed to reconsider their beliefs, to be willing to chuck everything they had been taught by the people they loved the most out the window, I had better be willing to do the same. To ask questions. To regard my culture with a critical eye. To be willing to temper my “worldview” with as much logical and emotional distance as I could muster.

That was a very good thing, a refining and refocusing of my faith. And honestly, I think this is an are where “third culture kids,” children who are raised in a culture that is not their own, have an advantage. They are the perpetual outsiders, savvy anthropologists who don’t fit into their home or host cultures (whichever is which). Everyone sees the world through their own pair of glasses, the lenses focused by education, experience, and cultural expectations–it’s just that third culture kids tend to have several pairs lying around, and find it easier to change them at will.

Anyhow. Fast forward twenty years, to a sleepy little county in Northern Wisconsin. Churches abound, their libraries stocked with books on developing a “Christian worldview” (invariably written by evangelical Protestant males of European descent). Christian novels, Christian newspapers, Christian music, Christian tee-shirts, Christian dietary supplements (?!) are everywhere. Politicians on both sides of the aisle season their speeches with oblique allusions to their Christian faith, in the hopes that if they can just brush the hem of Jesus’ garment, some of his glory will rub off on their agendas. And while not everyone in Douglas County, Wisconsin would claim to be a Christian, there are precious few of them who would claim to be anything else, a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist.

My question is, how is it possible to be a Christian in a place like this? How is it possible to tell the difference between your faith and your culture when they are, for all intensive purposes, one and the same? I’m overstating the point, obviously, but our preconceptions of what it means to be a Christian are HUGE. Do we assume Christians talk a certain way? Vote a certain way? Dress a certain way? Drink (or not drink!) a certain way? If we’re honest, most of us would question the salvation of a man seen swigging alcohol at a party with prostitutes. Good thing Jesus didn’t need to be saved.

If we strip away the preconceptions, take off our glasses and try our hardest to step outside our carefully crafted worldview, what are we left with? Is it enough? Is your faith built on the shifting sand of cultural Christianity, on what you’ve heard at church, from loved ones, on Christian media or from the latest Beth Moore Bible study? If those same sources told you something different, would you believe differently?

Or is your faith built on something that doesn’t change, on the salvation of God through the person of Jesus, as revealed through scripture?

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it can be hard to see Jesus through the religion that sprung up around him. I struggle with this constantly–I even struggle to remember to struggle, to keep searching for more and more of God instead of settling into the warm, familiar comfort of American “churchianity.” But I am afraid that the American church has been lulled to sleep by a false sense of security, that instead of running the race with perseverance, we’re playing the hare and hunkering down for a theological snooze, certain of our innate superiority and inevitable victory.

I guess what I’m really asking is have we put our faith in Jesus, or have we put our faith in Christianity? And which would we choose if (and when) the two are at odds?

If you’re not sure you can tell the difference between the two, a good place to start would be by reading the Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–in long, uninterrupted hunks, so you can get a sense of the big picture unfolding in each book, instead of little snatches of verses read out of order and out of context. Study Jesus–viewing the church through the lens of the Gospels, instead of vice-versa, can be very enlightening. I’m going to be kicking off my 2010 Bible reading with another pass through the Gospels, to refresh my focus on the person of Jesus. It’s just so, so easy to lose sight of him…

Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer and musician. She and her husband Aaron own DeepWater Music (www.deepwatermusic.net) and live in Northern Wisconsin with their four little boys. This post originally appeared at her blog jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.

There are few words spoken by women in these gospels, but many tears are shed and recorded, mostly by women, some even by Jesus, the man of sorrows. The fact that all these tears are detailed says that God values all our precious tears, whether for joy or sorrow. Psalm 56:8 tells us that, “God knows our troubles and our wanderings, stores all our tears in a bottle, has counted each one of them, and they are recorded in the Book.”

The beginning of the New Testament opens with glad tidings, the announcement of two children, which brought tears of joy to Elizabeth and Mary. This joy would be short lived for Mary, as Joseph tells her that he will put her away her quietly. The betrothed was heartbroken, to say the least. An angel in a dream restores their marriage. After Jesus is born, Mary and Joseph bring the child to the temple, and it is prophesied to Mary that, “a sword will pierce your soul.” Lk 2:35. When Jesus was missing for days, she would have been beside herself with worry, but Mary would experience many more tears.

Following the joyful birth of Jesus, other women are not so lucky. Mt 2:18 “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamenting and weeping bitterly: it is Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are no more.” Those women were bereft; Herod had given the order; the soldiers had killed their babies.

There was a woman in Lk 7:37-44, “who had a bad name… and had brought with her an alabaster jar of ointment. She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment. ‘You see this woman? I came into your house, and you poured no water over my feet, but she has poured out her tears over my feet and wiped them away with her hair.” Jesus was touched by her tears.

There was another woman, taken in adultery, Jn 8:1-11. This woman would have been shocked, sobbing uncontrollably, knowing she would be stoned.

A man named Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, had a daughter who died. Lk 8:52 “They were all crying and mourning for her, but Jesus said, ‘Stop crying; she is not dead, but asleep.” No doubt the woman who touched his hem, and was healed of her hemorrhage for 12 years would have rejoiced. Other women who would have wept with joy are the Syrophoenecian woman whose daughter was cured, the widow of Nain whose son was brought back to life and given back to her, the woman who had a crooked back for 18 years… and many more who heard the wonderful words of their Lord.

Jesus was friends with Martha, Mary and Lazarus. When Lazarus died, everyone wept. Even Jesus wept. Jn 11 says, “When the Jews who were in the house comforting Mary saw her get up so quickly and go out, they followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Mary went to Jesus, and as soon as she saw him she threw herself at his feet, saying, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who had come with her, Jesus was greatly distressed, and with a profound sigh he said, ‘Where have you put him?’ They said, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept; and the Jews said, ‘See how much he loved him!’ Sighing, Jesus thanked God.”

In Lk 23:28 Women wailed, “But Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep rather for yourselves and for your children.” He had such deep concern for mothers and their children.

There is no telling how many tears were shed at that cross or the tomb, by Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the other women. Their grief would have been unbearable. But on Resurrection morning, their tears of sorrow turn to shouts of joy.

Mk 16:1 says, “When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices with which to go and anoint him.” These women were still mourning for Jesus. Tears are louder than words.

Jn 20 says (twice) to Mary Magdalene, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Then he called her name, “Mary, go and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ So Mary of Magdala told the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’.” Mk 16:10 “Mary Magdalene then went to those who had been his companions, and who were mourning and in tears, and told them.”

Apparently it was important to mention even in Acts 9:39 that, “all the widows stood round him in tears, showing him tunics and other clothes Dorcas had made when she was with them.” Another woman was brought back to life. Our tears are not for naught.
Jesus paid attention to all the tears; he saw them; he acknowledged them; he even cried with them. There are many tears in the NT, which says that Jesus knows our suffering, he hears our cries. Jesus also promised in Jn 16:22, “Now you are having pain. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.”
Rev 21:4 says, “God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain for the former things are passed away.”

Thank God all our tears are recorded; each tear is counted, for our consolation. Jesus hears our cries; Jesus sees our tears. Jesus even cries with us.

Adele Hebert is an independent scholar, who lives in northern Alberta, Canada. Adele has been writing articles, bible studies and editing Christian books, all about how Jesus loves women. Adele has helped God’s Word to Women website, Christians for Biblical Equality, and recently worked with Leonard Swidler on his latest book, Jesus Was A Feminist. Currently Adele is writing a series of bible studies on how Jesus gave women a voice.