Patricia Raybon grew up in a “humble Black church” where the congregants sang with their whole bodies, heads thrown back and lyrics emerging like groans as they sang: were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Around the age of 12, Raybon learned that the song was a slave melody. The lyrics had layers of meaning, each one characterized by suffering. The song, a young Raybon realized, spoke of the cross of Christ, and it also described the hypocrisy of enslavement.

“If you were there for this Jesus you preach about all the livelong day, why do you chain me up?” Raybon writes. “If you can’t answer, is it because you were not there? When they crucified ‘my’ Lord?”

These are deeply uncomfortable questions that offer us “no place to sit in comfort.” Instead, they force us to look at sin and its disquieting effects. They give us no choice but to consider the profundity and depth of Jesus’ suffering, and the power it holds to render us not alone in our own suffering.

As we look forward to Easter weekend, may we not rush past the utter tragedy of the cross of Christ. There was “no place to sit in comfort” when the world went dark as Jesus breathed his last.

Even if just for a moment longer than we’d like to, like holding the stretch of a sore muscle, let us choose to feel the gravity of the crucifixion this week. And then, anchored by the hope of the resurrection, may we celebrate our victorious Savior who sets the captives free.