03/31/2026
From being a small child up to this present day….I have a fear of storms…especially thunder and lightening.
And here we are….The sky is tearing itself open tonight.
At 3am, when the world should be still, the heavens are anything but quiet. Thunder cracks like something breaking, lightning splits the darkness wide open, and for a moment, just a moment, everything is exposed. There is no hiding from it. No soft edges. No pretending.
And here we are, in Holy Week.
We often imagine the road to Good Friday as solemn, hushed, almost orderly. But tonight tells a different truth. The path to the cross was not calm. It was charged with fear, confusion, betrayal, and a kind of violence that shakes the soul like thunder shakes the sky.
The disciples must have felt something like this.
That sense that everything familiar was unraveling.
That God seemed both terrifyingly close and unbearably silent.
That the darkness was not just around them, but within their grasp.
Tonight’s storm preaches, whether we were ready or not.
Because lightning does something extraordinary, it reveals in an instant what darkness conceals. And isn’t that what this week does? It flashes before us the truth of the human heart: our capacity for love, yes, but also our capacity to abandon, to deny, to crucify.
And still… God does not turn away.
In the crash of thunder, we might hear judgment. But in the Gospel, we discover something deeper: God enters the storm.
God does not wait for calm skies.
Nor does our God demand that fear subside.
Our Creator steps directly into the chaos, betrayal, the suffering, and into death itself.
The cross is not God avoiding the storm.
It is God standing in the very center of it.
So if tonight you are startled, like me, if your heart is racing, if the storm feels too close for comfort, then you are closer to Good Friday than you think.
Because faith is not always quiet candlelight.
Sometimes it is trembling in the dark, waiting for the next flash, and daring to believe that even here….especially here….God is present.
And when the thunder rolls and the sky seems to break apart, remember this:
On the day Christ died, the earth shook.
The sky darkened.
Creation itself cried out.
But that was not the end of the story.
The storm does not get the final word.
It never does.
Amen.
