“Did the Willows weep, too?”

Meditations on God’s Friday

Did the crucifixion happen in color? I think of unhappy events as happening in black and white. Maybe this is due to my age. I grew up when newsreels and many movies were in black and white. So, the pictures in my mind’s eye of World War II, or of Holocaust victims are never in color. Bad things, sad things, unspeakable things all happen in black and white.

I’ve been to Jerusalem. It’s a beautiful city (at least it was in mid-February, 1979). It was an early spring that year. The almond trees were in bloom. The weather was unseasonably warm. The olive trees in Gethsemane cast shadows in the yard of the chapel that stands where Jesus prayed on the night on which he was betrayed. From this garden the walls of the Temple mount loom large across the Kidron valley. The sun shone also when we peaked into the “Garden Tomb” (not the real setting of his burial place, but more picturesque than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre).

But, I in my meditations as Jesus was pushed along the Way of Sorrows to Golgotha, the colors faded, the shadows deepened, the crowds taunted, the soldiers, the religious leaders, the women who followed Jesus…well, they were all there, doing their parts.

The gospel accounts say that the clouds gathered, the lightning thundered, the earth rumbled. On Palm Sunday Jesus answered those who wanted him to stop crowds from shouting their praises, “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” Well, on this day creation did weep.

Why is this so? I remember a conversation with an embittered widower. “What was so special about Jesus’ suffering and death?” He wondered. His wife had gone through years of chemotherapy, surgery, hospitalizations, pain, before she died. Jesus only went through one night of torture and three hours of dying.

There is no answer to his question. Healing only comes when we can begin to accept that God wept for this wife’s death as the very earth moaned for that of Jesus.

Do we turn a blind eye to suffering? Yes, of course we do, even when the images that flood into our living rooms are in full color. Homeless victims of the tsunami in the Solomon Islands, gaunt stares from the eyes of refugees from Darfur, and so many more. “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.” Jesus said. Indeed!

But, this is God’s day, and it is called, “Good.” Why? It is because God has worked out our salvation, our reconciliation with all creation as well as with our Creator on this day. It is the day that God has made, too, along with every other. It is for us to find a way to rejoice and be glad in it.

“For God crowns the year with bounty, the pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.” (Psalm 65:11, 12-13, adapted)

Blessings,

Rick