Behold, your king

We adore You, oh Christ, and we bless You; by Your Holy Cross, You have redeemed the world.

Note: These scenes were originally published in The Paradise King; a number of my friends like to read these stories aloud as a part of their Holy Week observations. I’ll be sharing the relevant stories this year to make those rituals easier. If you’d like the rest of the story and you haven’t yet read the book, you can always pick up a copy.

I’ll be publishing these stories a day early so they can contribute to your Holy Week celebrations if that’s helpful.

…

We haven’t got space for everything in the Passion account.

Not for the sweat like blood or the angel in Gethsemane or the young man running stark naked into the dark. Jesus prayed; his disciples could not stay awake. A detachment of soldiers and temple guards and Pharisees appeared. Judas led them. He walked up to Jesus and kissed him with lips like cold clay, and so Jesus was betrayed. He was tried many times—by Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod, though Pilate’s was the interview we saw. He was, at last, handed over to die.

The sufferings of Jesus are hard to depict, and the depictions we have are too often tacky and crude. In my experience, they foreground the blood and the violence and the agony. That’s an interesting choice because those are the dimensions of Jesus’ death all four Gospel accounts avoid. Matthew doesn’t even mention the moment Jesus died—the Roman soldiers just notice it happened. Truly, the crucifixion is difficult to engage. Too many treatments are both factual and misleading.

And so I think I’ll tell you a personal story.

When my wife and I had been married two years, we had our first daughter. Blonde and outgoing and shining as dew, she remains miraculous. We were not sure we would be able to get pregnant at all, and so when, two years after that, we learned we were pregnant again, we could hardly believe it. Two kids. That is more than we could have hoped for. It is possible to feel like the world is stacked in your favor. It is possible to see life as a mountain of presents, every one of them marked with your name. That pregnancy went well—we made it to twenty weeks with nary a hiccup. But on the border of week twenty-one, my wife woke up distressed. She knew, by a sense mothers possess, something was wrong. “It’s the baby,” she told me, and she was right. Her tiny heart stopped, and that dream suddenly ended.

That was a terrible time. It was also unreal, somehow. We made plans. We prepared a tiny casket. When I was a boy, I had heart surgery, and I had saved my shirt from the hospital. I padded the casket with it, the only way I could think of to tell her she had my heart forever.

The day we put that box in the ground was the worst day of my life. It’s possible to feel your heart coming apart, and when I scooped the dirt, one handful at a time, into the little grave I felt—I can hardly say. Some things you cannot describe. I felt, among other things, terribly guilty for leaving her there. I felt like I had abandoned her. I found myself explaining to the air that I didn’t have a choice, that there was no way to keep her. It did not help.

I also felt that if I had to do that again, I would die.

Then, several years later, it happened again—another little girl. Another interrupted pregnancy. Another burial of a tiny box. Death is not a simple thing.

Those days were dark. I felt like I was living on the edge of a black country, a darkness into which I could not reach for a hand I could not hold. It was always there, like a mirage.

And then one day I saw someone else.

I was on the back steps of my house. I was sitting alone. Suddenly I felt or detected, by a faculty stronger than sight, a man, far off to my right. He also was facing the dark. He stood like a traveler on the edge of that land. He was not tall. His dark hair was pulled back from his face, and his face was serious. Sad, and yet thoughtful, as though pondering unsearchable things. I knew who it was. I knew what I wanted him to do. I knew also that I could not ask— because I would not know what I was asking for—if I begged him to enter that country. But of course, that is the thing with Jesus—you do not have to. His face resolved and was stern. He shut his eyes and opened them again. And then the great king from out of the past stepped into the dark and was gone.

That is one thing you must have in mind. Only God can save us from death, and yet the cost is that He must go there. There is no way except through the sea of death.

Another thing you must think of is an image from the Psalms, which long ago predicted a war on the mountain of the rebellious gods (68:15-23). In that poem, the Psalmist saw siege towers advancing and chariots flash and fiery darts fly. He saw the silver shields of angels shine in the sun, and war descend upon the original rebels, the originators of evil, though humans, for our part, have made plenty of our own afterward.

Well, that war was coming. It was even then approaching a hill called the skull. A place of death, where ruined dreams were piled like sand for cold winds to scour. “A savage place!” as one poet put it, “As holy and enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover.” Holy War was coming there.

But there was no army advancing.

Just one man coming alone up the gray road.

And though there are more, many more, dimensions to know, consider two related images. One comes from the Day of Atonement. On that day, the Israelites prepared two goats. One was for Azazel, loaded with the iniquities of the people. One was for Yahweh, whose life would be a covering for the people. Though it is not described in the Bible, later texts describe the goat for Azazel being draped with a scarlet cord; they describe the people wailing as the goat departs, carrying foulness far away. Jesus would play both roles.

(Note: Azazel is one name for the enemy, the satan, in ancient Judaism. It is usually translated “the scapegoat” as in Leviticus 16:8.)

The second image comes from the Passover, when the blood of a Lamb would provide a covering for the people, and all those marked by its blood could escape the destroyer and join the Exodus. So it was—Jesus was on his way out of town. Blood dripped off the tip of his nose. The wood on his shoulder left a track in the dirt.

Women wailed and shouted beside the road. Jesus slowed down and spoke to them in a low voice. “Do not weep for me,” he said, “Weep for yourselves. If they do this when the tree is green, what will they do when it is dry?” Then they remembered they spoke to a king.

Up the hill he went, under a cloudless sky. Even so, the shadows were thick. Even the unbelieving among the crowd felt their hair stand up, sensing in part what Jesus could see. Spirits, old and vile as the first evil things, crowded the hilltop. They were horned as the nightmares of dragons. They were void as nothingness. They hissed and spat and raged in their accursed tongues. They glowered, not stopping to wonder what kind of war this was, or what kind of warrior, whose face was soft, and yet hard and sharp as a sword. On his head was a crown.

He reached the top of the hill.

A few days before, the disciples had been furious with James and John, for their mother had made an audacious request. “Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom,” she said.

Jesus had laughed when he heard it, laughter without mockery, and then grown deeply serious. “Can you drink the cup I will drink?” he replied. He looked ahead. “Indeed,” he said, “you will. But as to the arrangements when I enter my kingdom, that is not mine to decide.” Now they saw why. Jesus was about to come into his kingdom. And there in the places of honor were two crooks, one mocking, the other repentant, like the ranks of angels.

They put Jesus on the cross. They ran the nails through his hands and feet. They paused, and fixed a sign. At last, they lifted him up.

Behold, your king.

Can you see?

I hope you can, for you must behold. From Eden to Ur, from Ur to Moreh, from Moreh to Egypt, from Egypt to Dan, and then to Thebes and Horeb and Gilgal and Zion, there is a road. It runs from the Tree of Life that was there in the beginning, and it is long. Past Moreh it winds, past the Oak of Sorcerers. Uphill on Zion, beneath the feet of Abraham’s son. Past the staff that was draped with a snake outside Edom. It passes Golgotha, and runs all the way to the New Jerusalem, where strong, leafy branches hold fruit over the river of life.

This is that tree. This is that king, naked as Adam.

Darkness like the darkness that was over the waters covered the earth. This was a new beginning. Blood, red and shining and heavy as judgment, ran down the wood.

Perhaps history past and history future flashed before Jesus’ eyes: there were Adam and Eve, reaching for the tree; there was David, stealing Bathsheba; there were empires rising and civilizations destroyed; there were hundreds of years of colonization; there were our modern crimes. “Father,” he said, “forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.” He said, “Mother, here is your son; son, here is your mother.” He spoke the words of all humanity: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

He said, “I thirst,” and drank the cup he promised to wait for until the kingdom came (John 19:30). Much can be written of all he said.

But when he had taken that last cup, his face relaxed. The air was bowstring tight. His eyes were shut. He spoke, and when he did, his voice was one part grief and one part joy and one part sanctified rage. The demons heard it in one tone; the soldiers, in another; the angels, in yet one more. It was joy they heard, joy more intense than any that had existed since the world began. Jesus smiled. He opened his eyes. “It is finished,” he said. And then he looked up.

“Father,” he said, “into your hands I give my spirit.” He hung his head, and of his own volition died.

Oh, yes, the earth shook. The sky was black, and the curtain of the temple was torn. Far away, boulders fell on the altar of Pan, closing the gate of death. But at the foot of the cross, the centurion looked up. No spasms of death did he behold, no twisting fingers. He saw blood poured out, and water, and two arms stretched wide in blessing. “So,” he said, removing his helmet, “he was the Son of God.”