There’s something different about this cross this year.
There’s a huge, golden pipe cross hanging over the altar in the church where I
grew up and I’ve always loved it. There is something that induces so much reverence
when approaching that altar, that cross. They always cover it with purple cloth
all during lent and then on Good Friday they take away the shroud, and
everything from the altar, and it hangs bare, victorious.
This Good Friday is something different for me. It’s nothing
about the view, it’s the eyes that are different. And instead of the reverence
of the altar, the comfort of the beautified, smoothed and gilded version of the
cross, I feel my heart longing for the real cross. The one we don’t often think
about, because its dirty and uncomfortable and wouldn’t look so good hanging on
a chain around our neck. Before the real cross I find I can’t even raise my
head, can’t even look upon the blood-soaked wood, with flesh stuck to it and
nail holes driven deep. But that cross, the instrument of death, that is the
one I am desperate for this Good Friday.
And I think it’s because Death is no longer such an abstract
and far-away idea to me, just as well represented by gold as anything else. In
this last year I have held Death in my very hands many times. I have watched
the last beats of a tiny heart through the fragile chest. I have seen the
gasping last breaths and bluing skin. I have watched the eyes go void. I know
what the blood pouring really looks like. I see it in again in dreams sometimes.
Abuse is no longer an idea but is the real evil that sends babies into my care.
And no longer is that Friday, that hill, that cross such a
hard thing to grasp. And I’m grasping onto it, desperately clinging to that
very real cross, the blood-soaked grains digging into my hands. Because I am
finally truly desperate for its realness. Because I need it to be real, I need
it to be everything that I believe it is, that I know it is. That very real
place of death is the only thing that can really mean life. That, the place
where Death died, where Jesus took victory over all this evil, where light
shines to drive away all of the dark, I need that place to be real, to be
present. Because it is the only thing that keeps these lungs filling and
emptying, uncrushed by the very real evil my eyes have seen, believing in Life
that is more real than death. Life for those babies, for me, for you. After a dark Friday, glorious Sunday comes.
I have handed too
many babies through that veil that was torn, but my heart fills hopeful because
of the one death that defeated Death.
This evil doesn’t win. Jesus is making the sad things untrue. And it all
started with that ugly, real, rough-wood, blood-soaked cross. The one where my
heart is free.
