In Matthew 9, when Jesus was asked to explain why his disciples were not fasting like the Pharisees and the followers of John, He replied, “How can the guests of the Bridegroom mourn while He is with them?” It was a simple enough conclusion for Jesus. Why fast and be solemn or sad when I am present? It was neither appropriate nor, it seemed, possible to Jesus that while He was with them they should mourn.

    But that was not always to be the case. Little more than two years later, Jesus began to speak about another unthinkable possibility: the possibility of His going away.

    “I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy . . . Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy” (John 16:20, 22).

    The arrest was only a matter of hours away. They had had their final meal together in the upper room. Their feet had been tenderly washed by Jesus, and they were about to make their long, sad, and confusing walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus spoke to them His final words, His last earthly lessons. It is safe to assume that most of those last-minute instructions were not completely understood by the disciples. Jesus promised to send the Comforter and talked to them about the nature of His work. He spoke of the deep hatred they would all experience at the hands of the world. But how could they have understood any of that then? Those realities were all a world away, and between them and the present moment, there lay an ocean of confusion and sorrow and yes, eventually joy.

    In a few more hours, He would hang limp and lifeless upon the cross. The nails would be pried loose, and His swollen, bloody corpse would be tenderly wrapped in fine linen and laid in a borrowed tomb. For the followers of Jesus, there was no more certain reality than the bitter fact that it had all been for nothing. His followers had not rallied to save Him from the Romans. The twelve legions of angels He said He commanded had failed to come and save Him in the last moment. As Frederick Buechner said, “The miracle of the cross was that there was no miracle.”

    All their dreams seemed shattered the moment He shouted, “It is finished.” Could the few disciples who had remained close enough to hear Jesus roaring those final words have understood what He meant? The “It” of “It is finished” referred to the suffering He had to endure to purchase our forgiveness. The dark separation from the Father that is hell itself had been passed through triumphantly. Jesus was perfectly finished with the work He had come to do. But for those who first heard the echo of His words, nothing seemed finished. For them, the grief and sorrow He had promised was only beginning, and for three unspeakable days they would be lost in it, almost consumed by it. During those hopeless hours, they would resort to the language of lament as they cried out to the God who it seemed had forsaken them too. They would fall into the vat of the vocabulary of mourning as none of them ever had before. Their hope, the greatest hope the world had ever known, seemed hopelessly lost. For them “It is finished” meant it was over.

    The first part of His dark prophecy was fulfilled. Though the gospels do not give us the details, it is safe to assume that indeed they “wept and mourned while the world rejoiced,” just as He said they would. This was their time of grief, a grief so deep and hopeless we can scarcely imagine it.

    But here is the point: We must imagine it.

    If we are ever to know the wordless joy Jesus promised, the joy that no one will ever be able to pry from our hearts, then must we not also enter into the grief—their grief—of Good Friday? That, at least, was the understanding of the early church. Lent, they called it (from the Old English “lencten,” the word for “spring”). During this period of 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, the followers of Jesus would enter into the wilderness of the language of lament in preparation for Easter Sunday. With all the power of their corporate imaginations, they would interact as best they could with the biblical record of Jesus’ death. They understood what we have forgotten: you cannot arrive at the undying joy of those first disciples unless you risk entering into the deathly grief they went through—unless you try to uncover the lost language of lament.

    For us in the American church, lament is indeed a forgotten language. When 9/11 occurred, it uncovered this regrettable truth. We had no words, no songs to sing. It becomes evident so often elsewhere in the world when we are unable to minister to those who are suffering. Do the believers crucified in Sudan need to hear about our belief in the Jesus of prosperity? Do the tortured Christians in China recognize our Jesus, the great problem solver? When we try to speak about Him to most of the suffering world, this is the most significant language barrier. Though we may have learned their particular dialect, we are strangers to the vocabulary of their suffering. Our unwillingness to simply weep with those who weep reveals that we have lost the vocabulary of lament. How can we claim to follow the Man of Sorrows when we ourselves are so unfamiliar with suffering? For the sake of those we wish to reach for Christ, we must learn the lament of Good Friday.

    In our own prayer book—the Psalms—lament represents the most prevalent category, and yet seldom do we sing or corporately pray them. But have you forgotten it was Psalm 22 that Jesus spoke in the midst of His suffering on the cross? When the Lord was trying to find the words to speak the hell of his unspeakable abandonment by God, He found the words in the vocabulary and language of lament. At the moment when He was most being used by God, Jesus was lamenting. Only then could the “joy that was before Him” become a reality.

    As we rush to the elation of Easter Sunday—the precious joy Jesus said no one could take away from us—let us first stop and realize that we cannot savor its unspeakable goodness unless we first taste again the sorrow of the Friday we call “good.” Interact with those pitiful Passion narratives at the level of your own God-given imagination. Seek to feel how hopeless those first disciples felt when they mistook “It is finished” for “It is over.” Then, perhaps, you and I will be able to speak to the lamenting, fallen, and frustrated world around us about a new joy that they could never have imagined hearing and we could have never dreamed of telling.

—Michael Card

(all quotations are from the New International Version)

Award-winning author and musician Michael Card resides in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife and children. For more information, visit his website, www.michaelcard.com.