‘Do not give in to despair. We are an Easter people and hallelujah is our song.’ (Pope John Paul II) 

Easter is approaching, the time for death and resurrection. The time to mark the single greatest victory in the history of all humankind: love, light, goodness, truth, beauty and hope conquering hate, darkness, evil, lies, ugliness and despair. 

A place of despair 

Yet the road to the ‘hallelujah’ we sing is not always an easy one. For despair masquerades as many things. We are disappointed or weary. Frustrated, angry or indignant. We are sad. We are tired. Lured by productivity, we forget, and keep on forgetting, that our hallelujahs define us, not our inbox. And so we find ourselves functionally living from a place of despair. 

Our spirits and our senses dulled, we look for relief (not restoration), seek to exert control over the chaos, and throw money at anything that might possibly satisfy. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. 

The way through the suffocating despair of our age isn’t to deny its existence, or avoid thinking about it. It isn’t to plaster on a smile on Easter morning, clutching daffodils, desperately trying to summon up the sincerity to sing. 

Easter-people, Jesus-people, are those who join with all heaven and earth in groaning. This isn’t the way it was supposed be. 

The path of lament 

The road to hallelujah is along the path of lament. 

In lament we enter into death, rather than flee from it. We enter into death, that we may be released again into life. And in doing so, as Paul exclaims in Philippians 3:10, we get to know Christ. We share in the fellowship of his sufferings, and then our pursed lips cannot help but be loosened into praise. 

Our inner worlds are awash with disappointment, griefs, anxieties and pain. As Jesus says, ‘In this world you will have trouble’ (John 16:33). We can ignore or deny that, living lives attempting to anaesthetise the discomfort, but the truth is we can’t ever escape it. 

Lament gives us permission to grieve, to moan, to complain. There is no need for forced jollity or a stiff upper-lip. By bringing it out into the open, before God, rather than letting it stew under the surface, we are allowing our suffering to be framed in reality. The reality being that nothing we are facing, nothing, nothing, nothing is outside the care, concern and authority of the living Christ in our lives. Nothing. So in lamenting, we are acknowledging his proper place in our lives. By lamenting we are submitting ourselves, and our emotions, to the love and attention of a kind Father, who joins us in our weeping. As Nicholas Wolterstorff once wrote, ‘The chest of God is big enough for us to beat against’. 

Hallelujah 

As we recognise Jesus’ place at the centre of our struggles, we begin to live in the second half of the verse in John 16:33: ‘In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world’. Our difficulty becomes less something to be managed, or resolved, and more something that enlivens our hearts to hope. Jesus is here. Jesus is here. I’m not stuck. It’s not just up to me to sort this out, to fix this. He is bigger than this. Jesus is here. 

And those glimmers of hope, right in the midst of the struggle, are what allow us to inhabit our identity as an Easter-people. To be unmuzzled to sing hallelujah. Everything doesn’t have to be peachy, life is not a breeze, but with eyes fixed on the brilliance of Christ, we leave the place of death, and we rise again to new life. 

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. 

First published at Ros’ blog Squinting for Glitter