The night is dark. All that is in front of us is dark. There is no hope of ending. All we can do is endure. How do you endure the unendurable? I don’t know. But it must be done if we are not to die.

For Jesus there was the agony of torture, the knowledge that there was nothing that could stop it. No, he faced the cruellest of deaths. How did he endure? I don’t know. And I do not know how we face the dark and the pain. All I know is that we can run away and hide but it will pursue us, or we can face it. Or we can give up. But can we give up?

When we are in the darkness perhaps all we can do is call for help. We can shut our eyes and pretend that it is dark only because our eyes are shut and that everything is really okay, or we can open our eyes and accept that there is darkness and then, maybe then, we call for help.

And help is not someone solving it. Instead it is like Jesus wanting someone to stay awake with him on that night before his death. Sometimes all we can ask is that someone just stay awake with us in the darkness so that we are not alone. For the darkness is very lonely, but someone there in the darkness, maybe just reaching over and squeezing a hand, can remind us that we are not alone.

Maybe we need to wait in the darkness together until there is a faint dawn. For Jesus, after the night of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when dawn broke worse was to come, death in the most agonizing manner. I cannot conceive of the cruelty of humans who would do this to one another. I cannot bear it to think of it because it is too much.

Instead I must wait for the light; I must sit and wait in the darkness, holding on, hoping that there will be light. And I’m going to ask people to wait with me, to wait together for the light that will come one day.

In the terrors of Maundy Thursday night and Good Friday it feels that the darkness will never end, the pain will never end. I think of the relief that Mary, Jesus’ mother, and Mary Magdalene and Mary and Martha, all of them, must have felt when Jesus died. It was over; the agony of their beloved one over. They must have thanked God that it was over. I would have done. Then they would have gone to live their lives in the new, terrible normal. And I think they would have done so together.

So I say to you this Good Friday, if you are in darkness, stay together, call for help. Be next to each other. You cannot solve the darkness and the pain for each other; all you can do is hold on, be there for each other, wait together, because even Good Friday ended eventually. And what the women saw as the new normal of Holy Saturday, also known as Black Saturday, ended too.

It ended with another dawn, a dawn when there was hope again, when everything fell into place, when it was okay. When it was better than okay. When there was hope, when there was light, a new way of living. It all fell into place. And there will be a dawn for us too.

But that is for the future. For now let’s sit in the present together in the dark and be with each other, not afraid to tell each other what our darkness is, where we need light. Or if we have no words for that, if we cannot tell people, then just understand that we need each other.