The Emptiness Came First

Good Friday and Easter Sunday represent vastly different tones. Friday was bleak and somber death while Sunday was glorious and triumphant resurrection. But both days actually have something in common: the emptiness came first.

The day that Jesus died, His followers would take His body down from the cross, wrapping Him in cloth oddly reminiscent of his covering at birth. Yet instead of his lively infant body filling a manger, His lifeless form would occupy a tomb.

But even before this burial act, the disciples’ hearts knew an emptiness that could not be quenched. The men and women who travelled with Him felt the terrible ache of a lost friend. More than that, Jesus had filled their lives in every possible way. He represented not only a beloved companion, but their source of faith, hope, and direction. When someone fills your everything in this way, their absence is not just a hole, it’s a chasm.

As I write this, my foster daughter of 18 months has gone back to live with her mother. The majority of my waking (and sometimes sleeping) life has revolved around this peanut. Toddlers are messy, curious, and, in my case, adept at climbing on the toilet to reach the hot water at the bathroom sink. In the last few weeks, she abandoned even her fleeting nap time, so I found myself consumed with watching over this little bundle except when her shows were entertaining her. And although she commanded my agenda, and my quota for exhaustion, she also filled my heart in ways only that sweet girl could.

In the wake of her departure, there’s a vast emptiness all around me. I’m disoriented by the emptiness of my schedule, and my ability to accomplish tasks. The little pinecone she gathered and discarded under the couch reminds me that my hands are now empty on walks to the bus; her clean clothes still mixed in with my laundry speak of tasks no longer needed, and drawers to be emptied out. Something as simple as a sippy cup pings my heart every few hours with a sadness I can’t quite put down anywhere.

The intense ache of it all takes my mind to disciples all those years ago. How vast must their pain have been? Jesus taught with so many commonplace analogies for the Kingdom of God. Surely everything His followers passed would have brought to mind a moment with Jesus. When the women went to knead dough for bread, when the men passed their fishing boats, when they picked up something as innocuous as a glass of water- surely they must have felt the emptiness of what they’d lost. Jesus said they’d need to give up everything to be His disciple, and so they’d ditched their recognizable prior lives to orient their schedule around this man. His death left them disoriented by space they assumed could never be meaningfully filled again.

And so even before the tomb was filled, their hearts and agendas were undeniably empty.

But the resurrection also began with an emptiness, and perhaps a worse one than before. An empty tomb. Their leader was not only dead, but the last tangible vestige of His presence had been taken from them. I can only imagine the panic that moment must have created.

Yet that emptiness gave way to a filling that exceeded what they had previously understood. Though Jesus’ death gave them a faint taste of the ineffable loss of Jesus, His resurrection proved that they had MISSED the fullness of His identity before. The Jesus they buried was just a man after all, so they thought. But the Jesus they encountered after an empty tomb was Savior, Redeemer- God in flesh. Out of their initial emptiness, they discovered the Jesus who would yet ascend to fill the whole universe and their hearts with His Spirit.

If you find yourself, again, in a season of emptiness, perhaps there’s a hope deep within. Perhaps that great chasm reminds us anew of the capacity of our souls for love and hope. Perhaps the stretching of our souls in the poured out moments is the only way to make room for the fulness of Jesus’ presence. For I know He is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in Spirit. And I know that even though we can view the resurrection in hindsight, the love and hope and salvation of Jesus is still so far beyond what we can imagine or hold.

Perhaps we must give ourselves the space to fully inhabit the grief, the loss, and the emptiness. There’s no rushing through, no skipping the pain of Good Friday or the hurts of today. Maybe in allowing yourself to touch the cavernous walls of that vacancy, you can vaguely imagine the magnitude of the love and hope needed to fill it again. You may carry those scars, that story with you into your future. But maybe one day you’ll tell a new story too…a story only God Himself could write. And maybe, one day you’ll sip coffee with a friend and tell them your story- and you’ll say, “The emptiness came first…”