Though there are clouds, the sun blazes bright beyond them. He is Risen.
One of my favourite Easter phrases I’ve seen online over the past few years is: “Sunday is Coming.” It perfectly captures the anticipation my soul has long felt between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. A waiting, an uncertain certainty that echoes through time, off the walls of the empty tomb, reverberating to us in the many hopes of now. Moving from the sombre reflection of Good Friday to the celebration of Resurrection Sunday felt smoother before life became full of complications. Full of prayers that seem to hang in the air, caught somewhere between our lips and God’s ears, or perhaps between His hearing and His action. Before hard seasons bled into the days I’d portioned off for joy. And before aches and pains stuck around outside of acute moments that I could simply forget.
In the ease of life, in its beginnings, “Sunday is Coming” would have annoyed 23-year-old me. She would have said: “NO! Sunday has COME!” I can hear myself: “Well, actually, the joy of Easter is that God set it in time, a moment in human history, rather than just an ethereal or spiritual event that we could debate! Isn’t that cool? So we can always point back to this moment that death was conquered, Jesus’ declaration of ‘It is finished’ and the veil being torn in two, meaning everything is forever changed!” I say emphatically, “So, no, Sunday isn’t coming. Sunday CAME, and I’m so glad it did!!”
And that me is far from wrong. Yes, indeed. We are living on the resurrection side of history. Salvation and new life are gifts freely offered to all by God; healing is possible, and the Kingdom is now; sin has lost its grip, and we are no longer enslaved to death. It is a visceral, physical, human lived moment God chose to set in time, an act which signifies how wholly and tangibly we have been saved. Praise the Lord! This truth brings “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow” to me still. Sunday’s presence is my very self.
And it is becoming more richly my vision of the future.
Now, wading through life oftentimes feels more like swimming upstream than floating on the rivers of grace, I see the pained beauty of the phrase “Sunday is Coming.” I hear it as a literal truth we say, write, and share between Friday and Sunday. A moment rooted in time, and an inevitable truth that we take for granted: that the sun will indeed rise and set, and the days will certainly pass. Just as literally and as earth-rooted the first Easter was. A weekend of weeping followed by unspeakable joy.
But I also hear it as a promise.
I hear it like the words “It is finished,” as a cosmic shift that we’ve only begun to glimpse. A radiant eternity bathed in His resurrection light. A sun that will never set on lives more abundantly filled than we can begin to fathom. “Sunday is Coming” is the promise of a song I have only begun to learn, but my mouth was made to sing. It is the whisper of creation’s worship that I will one day erupt as a thunderclap. It is the assurance that suffering that bleeds into unending days has a dam that it cannot surmount. It is the certainty that very bones of all injustice and evil that rule the day shall break as the Lord of Hosts bows them at His throne.
Yes, the resurrected life is sweet. And sometimes the thick of the clouds can make us forget that there is so much more to come. And all that separates us are but clouds that will one day be cleared.
If this Sunday has come and your praise is mingled with despair, let me be the one to remind you: He is Risen. And this life, this chaos, this pain, and even these joys are not it. He’s not done yet.
Sunday is coming, friends.
Sunday is still coming.
Scriptural Reflections
2 Corinthians 4: 8-18
“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair; 9 we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed. 10 We always carry the death of Jesush in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed in our body. 11 For we who live are always being given over to deathi for Jesus’s sake, so that Jesus’s life may also be displayed in our mortal flesh. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life in you. 13 And since we have the same spirit of faith in keeping with what is written, I believed, therefore I spoke,B,j we also believe, and therefore speak. 14 For we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us with Jesusk and present us with you. 15 Indeed, everything is for your benefit so that, as grace extends through more and more people, it may cause thanksgivingl to increase to the glory of God.
16 Therefore we do not give up.m Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner personn is being renewed day by day. 17 For our momentary light afflictiono is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.p 18 So we do not focus on what is seen,q but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”