(A Holy Week Exploration)
By: Curt Cloninger
Friday
Three o’clock --- Friday afternoon. Merchants hawk their wares. Children play in dirty streets. Neighbors gossip over stone walls.
At three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, while the world was off doing something else, the Father turned away from the Son.
At three o’clock on this Friday afternoon the ones who noticed and the ones who cared were few and far between. The sky grew dark and the world grew still, and he breathed his last, the Son. His last.
The ones who noticed stood at a safe distance, and before they went off to have their dinner, they clucked their tongues at yet another Poser getting his come-uppance.
And the ones who cared stood near, inconsolable.
“We had hoped ---” But they could not even finish the sentence.
So they set their faces and planned a funeral before the sun went down.
Saturday
Grey. After the funeral and before their lives go on. Before the awful realization settles like dust on their shoulders, that they will forget his face, his smile, the way he made them laugh, his puzzling ways. This king, disguised.
Grey. All cried out. No energy left, even to mourn.
But none either for moving on with life, now however small.
So they sit in quiet, shades drawn, lights low, until someone offers a memory, in muted tones. “Do you remember that time with the bread and the fish?’ And story spins into story until the quiet falls again, with the realization that they’re just stories about a dead man. Then someone offers up a tidbit of food, of fish, perhaps, or bread. As if food is going to bring him back.
Sunday
The women decide to do something. Anything to keep from sitting any longer in that dark house. Early, in the space between darkness and day,
they bring spices, the women, to the graveyard. Spices. Tokens of devotion. Some small gauntlet thrown down toward the stench of death.
But there, by the grave, lit by morning’s first rays, (or by what, some great thought of God?) there, either lit, or themselves light, stand two messengers.
Out of the grey, their message: “Graveyards are for dead men, and he is not dead. You will find him elsewhere, very much alive.”
And in the joyful confusion all returned to them then. His face, his laugh, his voice. He himself. Alive. This King, disguised no more. Jesus.
Curt Cloninger © 2008