Bittersweet

 

This week as part of our Holy week celebration we, as a church will be participating in a passover seder, remembering the meal that Jesus would have had with his disciples shortly before he was arrested. Although my husband will be leading the experience and I will be at home looking after our daughter, I have been sourcing the food and helping with the preparation, and I have found it fascinating. 

The passover festival is one that can be summed up as bittersweet. Bitter as they remember the Israelites time of slavery and oppression and sweet as they remember the freedom from it and their great escape. In fact bittersweet is a term that fits the Israelites well, and throughout the scripture we see times of bitterness intermigled with times of great sweetness.

At the passover sedar the food that it eaten can also be described as bittersweet and at places, food are combined together to give exactly that experience. Bitter herbs called Maror (usually Horseradish) are dipped in a sweet dish called Charoset to bring a bitter sweet combination to the tastebuds.

As I was reading about the bittersweetness of passover and thinking about it in light of scripture, Jesus and my own experience I came across an article that explains that in biblical hebrew there is no word for Bittersweet, but in modern hebrew there is. It is called ‘Maktok-Mar’ Maktok means sweet and Mar as in Maror, the bitter herbs on the seder plate, means bitter. So instead of bittersweet it is sweetlybitter, which I like better I like to put the sweetness first and not dwell on the bitterness. 

Throughout lent, I, along with other ministers in our town, have met up weekly to study a book together about Jesus on the cross called ‘Godforsaken’. The name sums up what the book is about and I have to admit I have found it a really hard read. It seems to be full of the bitterness and very little sweetness! Maybe, because I’m a sweetlybitter type of gal rather than a bittersweet one I often struggle to look at the cross without thinking about the resurrection.

The Easter story, like the passover festival, is a bittersweet one. We see the bitterness of death followed by the sweetness of life. We see the bitterness of abandonment followed by the sweetness of union. We see the bitterness of separation from God followed by the sweetness of a curtain torn and a way made. 

I am sure that for each of us we are able to identify bittersweet moments in our own lives and journeys of faith. Moments where we are in a difficult and bitter situations and we see God’s goodness in the midst of it. In the darkest times of my life I have seen God's light shine brighter and seen his love in the sweetest of ways. 

In my decade walk through infertility, In the pain and bitterness of grief I have seen God move in the sweetest of ways. One of the sweetest of these is the community I have found while leading my moms in the making virtual group. The girls in my group, past and present have become such beautiful friends and in the midst of the darkest days, God shines bright within them. While pregnancy announcements still have the sting of bitterness, rather than being bittersweet I find them sweetlybitter

Psalm 34 has always been a favourite of mine, especially in my journey to be a mum. It is a bittersweet  or a sweetlybitter psalm. It begins extolling God’s goodness and mercy and in Verse 8 it declares 

“Taste and see that the Lord is Good” 

And then later in Verse 18 it tells us: 

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.”

This Easter as we look at the sweetlybitter picture of the cross, lets allow his sweetness in the bitter parts of our heart