Sure, Sunday’s Coming… But Today Is Still Friday
Because hope that won’t make space for heartbreak isn’t hope at all.
If you're a person of faith, my guess is that today your timeline will be full of reminders that "Sunday is coming."
While true and worthy of our celebration, it is not Sunday.
It’s Friday.
On Good Friday, Jesus's followers saw him betrayed by a brother’s kiss.
Beaten.
Bloodied.
Spit upon.
Stripped naked and humiliated.
And then murdered while the masses simply watched.
His family, his friends…
they had no understanding of a resurrected Christ.
No framework. No foreshadowing.
No “three days later” countdown running in the background.
Just trauma. Only grief.
What do you do when the one who was supposed to fix everything dies in front of you?
When the person you trusted with your hope and your heart, who you thought might even be the Messiah, is executed like a criminal?
This wasn’t just the death of Jesus.
It was the death of their story.
Their expectations.
Their understanding of how this whole God thing was supposed to work.
And they didn’t get to skip to the good part.
They sat in it.
Confused.
Scared.
Disoriented.
All of them were carrying more questions than answers.
That’s what Friday does. It disorients.
And before it heals, it undoes everything.
No hope of an empty tomb.
All they had was the unbearable now.
They still had their traditions and were loyal to them, as evidenced by wrapping Jesus's body and waiting until the Sabbath had passed to prepare it for burial.
But faith? I'm not so sure.
For some, perhaps love and naivety held it together by a thread.
It was dead for Peter, as he left the others and returned to his old life as a fisherman.
Yes, Sunday's coming, but Friday is here, and this pattern repeats itself over and over again.
Life is both joy and pain, faith and doubt.
We like to think of Good Friday as a day on the calendar, a somber pause before the celebration.
But Friday isn’t just an event.
It’s a rhythm.
A recurring beat in the soundtrack of being human.
It’s the doctor’s face before they speak.
The silence after the prayer you swore God would answer.
You replay the voicemail just to hear their voice again.
It’s the pink slip in your inbox, the divorce papers on the counter, the long look in the mirror that asks, “What now?”
It’s the baby that doesn’t come home from the hospital.
The relationship that doesn’t get restored.
When “God loved the whole world” became “America first.”
The faith that doesn’t snap back into place like it used to.
Friday is the moment when the story you’ve been telling yourself no longer holds up.
When the theology you clung to doesn’t account for this kind of pain.
It’s disillusionment and disappointment, dressed in church clothes and empty platitudes.
And yet… this is part of the pattern.
Not a failure of faith, but the soil where something deeper grows.
Where real hope isn’t handed to you, but wrestled from the ground you thought was barren.
It's on Friday that we come face to face with our doubts, our fears, our anger...
and it's a good thing.
Because these things must come out,
and our God is the only one who can absorb our pain and transform it into healing—
because the pain we don't allow to be transformed will always be transferred onto another.
Always.
The ancient Eucharist Prayer is so simple and so profound:
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
You say all three parts together because that is the whole gospel.
It acknowledges our worst days, when nothing makes sense and God seems anything but near, good, or even real.
And it affirms the best day—that Christ is near, is good, and as close as your next breath.
And it acknowledges that I, you, and this whole creation are in progress.
We are holy temples and unruly messes all at the same time.
And it's in this "coming again" that we place our hope.
Regardless of our end times theology, all of those who carry the hope of Jesus know this:
It won't always be this way.
It can’t.
But on Friday, it is this way.
Sit in it.
Wrestle with it.
Let tears flow and pray through clenched teeth and balled fists,
and know that this, too, dear friend, is worship.
May your doubt not be a detour, but a doorway.
May your fists find release, and your grief find ground.
And may the silence of Friday remind you: even God once felt forsaken.
"We like to think of Good Friday as a day on the calendar, a somber pause before the celebration.
But Friday isn’t just an event.
It’s a rhythm.
A recurring beat in the soundtrack of being human."
So good, Jon!!