1975 was a big year for me. “Saturday Night Live” premiered. I started the first grade. Jaws came out, and I learned a new word. 1975 was the year that my dad’s dad, my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. It was lung cancer even though he was never a smoker. I remember the last time I visited him in the hospital. He looked so skinny and weak, and his eyes which had always been so quick to laugh and provide comfort were dark and sunken deep into his face. I looked at him with fear. His nails were long and yellow, and his hair was messy. If my parents weren’t with me I wouldn’t have believed this was my grandfather. He looked, after all, sick; not at all like that invincible man who gave me my first Bible or who always had Lucky Pink Elephant popcorn for my sister and I. In the car on the way home from the hospital my parents taught us the word Irreversible.
Just a few weeks later we learned how powerful that word is. We buried Grandpa Friesen on a crisp winter morning.
Since that funeral the weight of that word has visited me numerous times.
Like the time I saw my sisters’ hand in the door of my dad’s work truck and I thought it would be funny to slam that truck door.
Or when I was playing in a fort I had built with a few friends out of oil soaked, discarded railway ties and we lit a fire in our boy-made fireplace. To this day we live scares marking that moment.
Or the time I saw a gopher run into a pipe and I trapped it; cruelly pounding it with a pole, laughing as it cried and it started to bleed and then went silent. That act of cruelty, my own cruelty, shocked me beyond measure, and I long lived under its shadow of shame and guilt. I yearned for some way to erase it, to reverse it.
There followed a whole succession of scenes I likewise wished to reverse: fights with bullies, foolish comments in class, unexpected pop quizzes, the inevitable first automobile accident, and all the other minor jolts of growing up, each one underscoring the dreadful word irreversible.
In thinking again about my grandfather’s death, the funeral seemed surreal. It was my first funeral, though by no means my last. I remember two of my younger cousins running around and playing and even I though only six years old I didn’t feel like playing. After the graveside service, we went downstairs in the church and ate cheese and bread and pickles, sitting awkwardly, not sure what to say. With this palpable sense of grief and sadness, the weight of death bearing down upon us.
What would it be like to walk outside to the church parking lot and there, to our utter astonishment, find grandpa. Grandpa! With his bounding walk, his crooked grin, and clear grey eyes.
That image gave me a hint of what Jesus’ disciples felt on the first Easter. They, too, had grieved. But on Sunday they caught a glimpse of something else, a startling clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter hits a new note, a note of hope and faith that what God did once in a graveyard in Jerusalem , he can and will repeat on a grand scale, for the world. For grandpa Friesen. For us. Against all odds, the irreversible can be reversed.
The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann expresses in a single sentence the great span from Good Friday to Easter. It is, in fact, a summary of human history, past, present, and future: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”
Life from death. Hope from despair. Resurrection from crucifixion. Holiness from sin. Christ in you and me. Our God takes the “ir” out of irreversible.
Peace, dwight
