It's Holy Week.  Holy Week is about suffering, helplessness, and pain.  It's also about joy, pure and holy joy.  Holy Week takes us into the deepest of darknesses, yes, but it also  takes us into the most profound of all light.
     As our planet continues to reel from Covid-19, pain and disaster seem, more than ever, integral, inextricably integral to our lives.  Holy Week tells us that, yes, suffering is a part, an essential and unavoidable part of human existence.  Yet it also tells us that this is only the beginning of the story.  There's much more to the narrative, much more to the tale.
     Holy Week tells us that the end of the story is that on which we must focus most.  Indeed, pain is part and parcel of our lives.  But only part.  In Jesus' suffering, we see ourselves.  And he us.  But it is in Jesus' resurrection that we ought to see ourselves even more.  It is in that pivotal moment, that epochal moment in which God conquered death that we must look.  For it is in it that we see our future.
     For some, Holy Week is silly and parochial, a foolish invocation of presences and forces that do not exist.  Perhaps.  More broadly speaking, however, definitely not.  Consider the 

Modern Museum of Art's description of this painting:  "The Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget when the next catastrophe occurs."
     We crave security; we crave control.  We weep when we see our fellow humans in pain. We weep over the suffering, we weep over the events that led to it.  We weep over our fallen world.
     Yet in Holy Week we see that death is but the prelude to life.  It's not the end.  God is here, God is there.  Jesus' death presents a God who is bigger than disaster, a God who is bigger than the very darkest of pain.  Jesus died, yes, the Messiah slain, but God lives.  And Jesus rose.
     And God is God.  Though disaster fills this world, God's power fills it even more.