‘The Hardest and the Saddest Week’

“This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.”

Those were the words of US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, speaking to “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

He added, “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.” 

The numbers are plain. Barring the miraculous, thousands of Americans and thousands more around the globe will die this week from COVID-19 infections. It really is an astounding, heartbreaking, frightening thing. Especially because, unlike Pearl Harbor and 9/11, this is a tragedy we know is coming.

But there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

I’m not sure what it means, but I feel there must be some significance that this week–“the hardest and saddest week”–is also Holy Week. It’s the week that begins with Palm Sunday, a celebration of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

When he arrived, humbly, atop a donkey, people lined the streets and cried “Hosanna.” They called out to him to save them. From oppression. From suffering. From life under the thumb of Death.

Holy Week gets darker from there. Jesus predicts his death. He has a final meal with his disciples, during which he identifies his betrayer. He weeps blood. He receives a traitor’s kiss. He is arrested, tried, wrongly convicted, and then killed.

Of course the peak week of coronavirus deaths in the United States is not the same thing as Holy Week. But they both bring tragedy, darkness, and the seemingly unstoppable force of death. Jesus knew what was coming. But he went anyway.

I’m not entirely sure what the proper connection is, but of this I’m sure; just as Jesus knew the sting of death would not have the ultimate word–that he would rise again, defeating death, and conquering physical and spiritual oppression for eternity–we too can have hope.

Our hope is not that earthly death is yet over. But that it is conquered.

Death does not have the last word–neither death by crucifixion nor death by COVID-19.

This does not mean we don’t mourn. Jesus himself wept when Lazarus died, though he knew he would raise him from the dead. Jesus wept at facing his own death, for it was an unimaginably heavy cup to drink. But through the mourning, we have hope.

And while we do have some hope in the resilience of the human spirit, that’s not the hope that allows us to face this week with fearlessness and compassionate lament. Our ultimate hope is in the Spirit of God, who lives in his people.

This week is going to be hard. There will be death. There will be many tears.

For this we should mourn. It should make us see death is something wrong with creation. It should help us realize that the things that seem stable and sturdy in this world are often fleeting and fallen.

And in the midst of these realizations, we can still have hope. Not ultimately in our earthly survival. Not ultimately in medicine or hospitals, amazing as they are. Not ultimately in our commitment to learn and do better next time.

But in the completed work of Jesus, who says to pandemics, principalities, and sin, “It is finished.”