Holy Week Tuesday 2007: A reflection

Holy Week Tuesday

I had been full of sprightly freshness, greening leaves and liquid sap, nourished and full, moving towards the sun and playing with the desert winds. Until that day I had lived a life of freedom and movement.
Until that day
On that day, they came, humanity, and they severed my tendons, carved brutally through the trunk of my existence, I stumbled, I fell. They came with what they later called the Banality of Evil tucked away in their minds, oblivious to the consequences of their savage destruction of this created thing. They had mundane jobs, but it was a living, one with the axe, another with the plane, one dug the hole, a careless way to destroy what I would later become.
I found myself upright once more on Crucifixion Day; I had been created at their hands, shaped to fit the back and the outstretched arms of an innocent. By now I was a desiccated, coarse lump of wood, my sap had drained away, I had been lying parched in the heat, immobilised, devoid of movement. It was good to be upright again; upright, useful, reaching for the sun. I waited, a simple wooden cross, made by people who were simply doing their job. The nails had been made, standard issue, fit for purpose and the hammer also, the skin on the soft palm of perfection driven through with the hot metal. The head crushed with thorns, a crown for a criminal.
The body when it came to me was already destroyed. The weight hung so freely that I swayed in the wind.
There was an atmosphere of impending disaster; the clouds hid the light, clustered together as though even they felt afraid of what inhumanity had done to this weak decrepit piece of human life. There was a sinister wind on That Day.
It took a long time for the life to drain away, even death it seemed, was reluctant this time, death hovered, as though afraid to carry out its task. I held the soft flesh, the angular bone in position, willing on death, sickened to the core of what I was unable to stop. I remember the words ‘forsaken’, the sense of a person cut off from God and disappointed by God. When death arrived, the crucified one did not meet it wordlessly but with words of completion. But the deepest voice which rang out across the hill on that day was one of relief and of triumph. This is what it said; ‘It is finished’, there was a small victory in this carcass, wilting in the hot blood human destruction.
Here I was holding a victor who seemed a pauper; keeping in my wooden arms the tangible presence of an ending which revelled in its finality.
Then, nothing, on to the next. They broke the body, pulled it down, a slab of meat, shredded skin, hanging intestine and then I was alone again.
It was an anticlimax; there had been hesitancy in the crowd, a reluctance to move away and two women who cried as though they had known this pathetic ending with equal intimacy.
Then, more nothing, and then I gave up, what was I waiting for anyway?
It took time, days in fact for me to recover my senses. I had known something which I could never explain. I had known the possibility of being a living tree once more; there was a power in the stillness of the condemned.
Time passed pointlessly and then suddenly it felt to me as though the whole earth had split in two. A tearing sound and a seam appeared pulling me in two straight down my centre. A chasm of hollow wood, I sensed this gaping, grieving gap opening further, split apart. I had been coated in blood, by now dried and flaking, now this wound opened within me, I was wrecked.
But this was the day on which everything changed forever, I sensed a strange calm and a movement within the chasm. I began to develop pale green leaves, they sprang from every corner of my wooden frame, soon I was coated in a vibrant green cloak of leaves. The moved in the breeze, shimmered in the sunlight, covered the deep wounds coated in blood. The blood remained in thick clots a constant memory of the pain, betrayal and agony of rejection, but another thing began. Cool, fresh water began to pour from my sides, forming fountains from the four corners of my structure, cleaning the scars, drenching me in liquid refreshment, soaking the cracked wood, the earth in which I stood, making me glisten, green and vibrant in the sun.

This was my resurrection, a day of freshness, newness and green vulnerable leaves growing tenderly from the deepest wounds of human life. There have been other resurrections since this day of days. There was the Palestinian who gave his dead son’s heart to a Jew, offering a new life which crossed the divide of religious resentment. There have been small kindnesses, which have melted the ice of bitterness; there have been days when in the deepest days of despair chasms of grief have become verdant valleys of hope. There have been days when people have accepted their scars as I did, lived with them in order to remember what they represent. There have been days when people everywhere have been made aware of an inner knowledge; the knowledge of the presence of God in all things and all places.

The power of this resurrection offers hope of an everlasting renewal and the knowledge which I sensed, with the hesitant approach of death, the intimacy of the women who followed Christ on That Day and waited with me. On such an incomparable day, there was something else, knowledge of something else, something endless & unseen. There was the constant sound of singing.