I didn’t know.
When you died, you hadn’t slept for awhile, perhaps not for a couple days.
You hadn’t had anything to eat or to drink for almost a day.
You spent your last day having been accused, spat on, stripped naked, beaten.
And if that weren’t enough, you got to carry a huge-ass plank of wood on your back as you walked for miles in the cold, spring desert air. You carried that wood on no sleep, no food, no energy. (OK, maybe the Spirit’s energy. But that's it.)
You took all our arrows. You took all our accusations, lies, and hate, and you took our nails. Big ones, too. Designed to prevent you from going anywhere.
You were human. You stood – barely – dying a slow death, asphyxiated, suffocating because you couldn’t breathe. Apparently when your arms are stretched out sideways, it prevents quality amounts of air from entering your lungs and is fatal after a long enough period of time.
You didn’t get the privilege of a quick death. Yours was slow and painful, starting with the dread a few days earlier, then accelerating through the hunger, thirst, fatigue, flogging, before finally, mercifully surrendering to the desperate cries of your body for release. You were human. No one was going to go through what you did and come out alive.
I’ve known this story all my life. Today is a gloomy day. You were crucified, and because of it we have to go to church dressed in black hearing sad words and singing somber music. At least, that’s what I grew up with. It was about remembering.
But I didn’t know, Jesus, what it meant to fight to survive through a day like that. I didn’t know what it meant. Sure, “believe in Jesus and I have salvation, Jesus died for my sins so I am saved, blah blah blah…”
You died so I could throw my shit at you, throw my shit at your cross. You died so I could stop living my life as if it were Good Friday every day. And Lord, only you know how many Good Fridays I’ve gone through. Nothing compared to yours, of course, but still.
Last night I had a dream of one aspect of my own personal Easter. I was living out a poignant (but certainly Biblical) desire with someone I knew. It was genuine. It was honest. It was deep and personal and intimate. It’s the second such dream I’ve had since early January. I’m still struggling to interpret it, to understand what it means. All I can do is go on faith that it does mean something, to actively wait to see how it might peripherally unfold.
Easter will come. But even you had to go through your Good Friday to get there. But it’s taken until now for me to begin to understand all that.