There are events and days that burn themselves into your memory. Yesterday was one of those days for a woman in our community. A frantic search had begun the evening before when her husband did not return from work. His joy involves traveling around the hills in a van making deliveries, so people didn’t know where to start looking. The usual places turned up nothing. Then, yesterday morning, the van was spotted in the parking lot of an area business. Everything looked normal until a closer examination revealed that the driver’s seat was reclined. Laying on the seat. looking peaceful, with a small medicine kit in his lap was her husband. He was dead.

An unattended death in South Dakota requires a careful examination and investigators from the Sheriff’s office were soon on the scene. Photographs were taken. The body was transported to the hospital for a blood draw. The woman was kept informed about what was happening, but there was a delay before she could see her hospital. In the midst of that delay, I entered the scene. I visited and had a prayer with the woman, made sure she had a glass of water and some tissues and got some information on the status of the investigation. I explained some of the procedures and the reasons for the careful investigation. Before too long we were able to go to the hospital morgue for an initial viewing. As we were still waiting for the paperwork to catch up with the coroner, she was not allowed to touch her husband until later in the afternoon when his body was released to the funeral home.

It was a day that she will never forget.

I suspect that the telling of the story of the day has already begun as her closest family members make phone calls to more distant relatives and friends are notified. My writing of a couple of paragraphs in today’s blog is part of that process of telling the story. I have been careful to write a somewhat generic description in those paragraphs, however. The man and his widow deserve to be remembered for much more than the events of a couple of hours.

It was that way with our people. The events of the last week of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem were dramatic and the pace seemed to rush along toward a very tragic ending. As his friends and disciples witnessed the awful events they spoke to their friends and the process of telling the story began. By the time we came into the picture the stories had been told over and over again until a few key details and a few dramatic descriptions had become formulas for telling the story. The events of the day that has become known as Good Friday were filtered down to a few paragraphs in the Bible and a few rituals and church practices. Most Christians can tell you that Good Friday is the day that the son of God was flogged, ordered to carry the cross on which he would be crucified and then put to death.

We don’t have a clear memory of why we call the day “Good.”

Some scholars see the origins of the name of the day in the term “God’s Friday” or “Gottes Freitag.” Others maintain it comes from the German Gute Freitag. Still others say that the name refers to the way that the death of Jesus shows God’s great love for humans, and sacrificed in order to purchase for humans every blessing.

It probably isn’t important that we know the reasons for the name of the day. In some places, perhaps most notably Denmark, the common term for the day is Long Friday. It is also known as Holy and Great Friday and Chartfreitag (Sorrowful Friday).

For the new widow, yesterday may have seemed like a long day. There were periods of waiting and longing to see her husband even though she knew that what she was going ot see was only part of what she had loved. The reality of his death was sinking in deeply even as the sometimes ponderous process of investigation and paperwork seemed to grind on and on without any definite resolution.

No one counted the number of tissues used to wipe away the tears. No one kept track of the time, though we looked often at the clock that seemed for a while to have been stopped as our conversation drifted into silence because none of us had words for the depth of the experience.

It was too soon to offer comfort. All we could give was our presence.

Now, a couple of millennia later, our people haven’t forgotten the day of Jesus death. Our memories are incomplete. There are details that once were clear to the disciples, but that no one remembers any longer. We’re never quite sure how to commemorate the day. Should we have a sermon? Should we invite in the neighbors? Should we join with other congregations? Should we read the story again and again? Should we light candles? Should we follow the stations of the cross? How should we mark a day that we cannot forget, but which none of us wants to be the only memory we have of Jesus?

It is another day in the story of our life as a community of faith where our words fail us. The gift that we have to offer to each other is our presence.

So we come together. Part of the time we simply sit in silence together. We read some familiar texts, we say a few prayers, we recall other times of loss and grief in our lives. Our conversations are limited. There are no words to fully capture the meaning of the day.

And we wait. The vigil continues. Like the widow who cannot imagine how her life will unfold in the midst of this new reality of a husband whose funeral must be planned, we have some sense of what comes next, but there is much that is yet to be revealed.

Long Friday is not a bad name for the day.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.