Holy Week Reflections on Lament, Presence, and Collective Liberation
For Lenten Season, members of the Juniper Formation Leadership Team have been sharing daily reflections through the Daily Ripple app and Substack. This week’s reflections are written by Rev. Candace Woods.
Common Lament
“My God, my God,
Why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far away,
so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?”
Psalm 22:1
In this moment of our world’s history, I’m grateful for the examples of lament that we have access to in the Scriptures. I’m grateful to know that for all of human history people have been literally and metaphorically raising their fists to the heavens, questioning the distance that they feel from the Creator.
At the beginning of this particular Holy Week in the year of 2025, it’s also somehow a balm to my soul to know that these words connected Jesus to the common human experience of lamenting the conditions that he faced. These words from the Psalms were on his lips as he endured the weight of persecution from the Empire. In his co-mingled divinity and humanity, Jesus felt fully the pain and suffering of state oppression and he used these words of lament from the Psalms to help him express that pain.
What freedom and permission that gives us to fully express the pain of this moment of our collective history.
How do you need to express lament today? What pain needs to be spoken and shared in community?
Present with the Pain
When Jesus returned he found them asleep. He said to Peter, “Asleep, Simon? Could you not stay awake for even an hour? Be on guard and pray that you not be put to the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Mark 14:37-38
As Jesus intuited the severity of what was coming down the pike for him, he took his friends to a garden and wept in the quiet space, asking his buddies to simply stay awake with him as he mourned. And they couldn’t. They dozed off as their leader, their friend, their comrade lamented.
Whereas “wokeness” has been vilified in many current conversations, Jesus essentially told Peter, “stay woke.” Jesus called his companions to stay present with the pain and truth of what was happening in that moment. His admonishment to Peter recognized that the heaviness of “the world as it is” tires and exhausts the body, even as the spirit and soul are willing to engage.
In the midst of the heaviness of the world, with whom is the Spirit calling you to stay awake? May we work to be present to the specific harms and hurts of our friends and neighbors, sitting with them in solidarity.
Notice today how the people around you are in pain. Or maybe you’re the one hurting. How might you hear the call to stay awake? Or how might you invite someone to sit with you in the bigness of what you’re feeling?
Faith & Freedom
But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.
Galatians 3:25
Sometimes I mention to friends that my life has gotten significantly better since I stopped thinking about sin so much. For context, I grew up in a pretty fundamentalist church and I spent a LOT of time worrying about whether that twinge of jealously or the mean thing I said to my sibling or (God have mercy) that sexy thought I just had would mean that I had backslid and that I would no longer be guaranteed a spot in heaven if I happened to die before repenting.
It was exhausting.
In this verse from Galatians, I hear the writer creating a framework for helping us abolish the cop in our hearts and minds. With faith, there is freedom from condemnation, from harsh discipline, from lives of anxiously combing over every action.
We can rest.
There will always be room to grow, of course. There will be room to expand our capacities for love, for forgiveness, for taking care of the people in our lives and treating them with kindness. All of that is limited by obsession over purity. What actually creates space for loving action is liberation.
How might you live into the liberation from shame and condemnation a little bit more today? What might banishing the cop in your brain feel like?
True Liberation
All of you who have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or citizen, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:27-28
“Your categories that create hierarchies of power and oppression are no more in the world where Christ is liberator.” That’s what I hear these verses saying.
I think it’s vital in our current context that we get really clear about what liberation actually means. Liberation is not freedom from interdependence. It’s not a bludgeon with which the most powerful nation in the world devastates its impoverished neighbors.
No. Liberation is the act of redistributing wealth and power in a way that allows for equitable relationships to actually be possible.
Liberation means a destruction of the categories that would give the powerful “justification” for hoarding their wealth and power. Categories around gender, race, immigration status, nationality, etc. are used as tools for oppression. And in Christ, we’re told that those categories are obliterated. Thanks be to God.
In what ways have I benefited from systems that uphold hierarchy or oppression? How does that awareness sit in my body?
What’s one tangible act of solidarity I can take this week that reflects a Christ-centered vision of liberation?
I will restore the land and assign you the properties that have lain waste. I will say to the prisoners, ‘Come out!’ and to those who are in darkness, ‘Show yourselves!’ Congested roadways will become places where they can safely graze, and barren heights will become lush pastureland for them.
Isaiah 49:8-9
As we consider and become awake to the realities of the world as it is, it’s important that we also hold with us a vision and a dream of the world as it could be.
On this Good Friday, there will be much said in churches and Facebook posts and devotionals about the violence of the State, the realities of oppression, the truth of climate change. And we need to feel that. Fully. And see it. In its entirety.
AND.
We must let our imaginations run wild with the dreams of what might possibly be. A world where the land is restored: where crops grow and ecosystems are in balance and humans have stopped our rampant devastation. A world where there’s abolition: where prisons aren’t remembered and justice is about care and we don’t police one another.
We must hold these things together. This holy weekend helps us do that. Today, know and be awake to the world as it is. Tomorrow, live in the tension of transition. And on Easter Sunday, dream a wild dream of life and restoration and hope and care and kindness and joy and peace.
Journal today about a reality of the world as it is that causes you and your loved ones pain. What are its root causes? What are its impacts?
And on Sunday, journal about what the world would look like if that was changed. How would it feel? What values would hold that world together?