Good Friday - Meditations at the Cross

It shouldn't be sunny today. As though this was just any other day.
I sit, a sinner, beneath stained glass saints,
Sunrays streaming through them to rouse them to motion.
Doesn't it say somewhere - that the sun shines on both saints and sinners?

But I don't want light on me, today of all days.
I need for it to be dark, with rain, Heaven's tears spitting unceasingly.
At least it should be dull: the sky fish belly white,
the gills of Heaven grey, tinged with jaundice,
with clouds billowing across like quarantined galleons diseased with fever,
harbourless, destined to glide in deathly silence over a mournful Earth below.
It simply should not be this shimmering blue,
with feathery kisses of marshmallow clouds. Innocent.
For inwardly I am weeping,
heart dark and burgeoning with secret mourning. Guilty.
O the loneliness of an unabsolved penitent,
hiding in a church corner on this day.

The birds are singing outside, as though there was cause for celebration.
All the spring flowers are out,
spreading their guileless smiles at the God who made each of them.
What do birds and blossoms know about sin and sorrow?
As long as there is something to peck at on the ground,
open sky to swoop in, and just air to sway gently within,
they are content.
Doesn't it say somewhere though - that God's eyes are on the sparrow?
That all in Creation lift their arms, and clap their hands with gladness,
for simply being alive?

Today, hunched in a corner, I am alive.
That is, I breathe, walk.
But the tendrils of brokenness creep like poison ivy
into every chamber of my heart;
the vines of fallenness have tightened their stranglehold
so I wheeze and choke and gasp for the lack of blood and air.
Doesn't it say somewhere - Why look for the dead among the living?
Why not? For among the living surely the dead walk.

Jesus hangs dead today, on a tree.
For the world. For me.

I want rain to fall on Him today.
Piercing, icy pellets that are the Father's anguish
dripping onto His thorn-gashed brow.
I want the chill to congeal the flow from His hands and feet and side.
But not entirely, so a trickle remains,
to bide time with me, as I bleed in my soul these three interminable hours.

Yet it's sunny today, and Christ's body is bathed in golden sunlight,
with a soft breeze gently brushing the now stilled limbs,
the fragrance of hyacinths and the melodies of songbirds
tenderly caressing the sunken chest with its dead, broken heart.
In this moment, His body seems to strangely glow on the bloodied wood.
His eyes - those disturbing, penetrating eyes that once looked both soft and hard at you,
that sees through you and draws you in - are closed in unforgetful slumber.
It ends. Life ends.
And Creation seems to capture that Truth, so all within it holds a collective breath.
Death holds sway, and somewhere in the distance there is a soft cackling.

So I sit, in April sunshine,
My own dulled eyes trained on the pallid countenance of the Saviour of the world,
as dead within me as He is dead.
We regard each other in a shared suspended animation.
Finally, in death, we are the same; we understand each other now.
This is where I want us to remain, for all Time,
So I could sleep at last, a big, long sleep.
Perhaps never to stir again to pain.

But I know, deep within, that somehow this will never be.
In a trice, and an eternity,
Jesus will live again, and drag me, the unwilling, recalcitrant corpse
back to the land of the forever living.

Doesn't it say somewhere - that this is why it is called Good Friday?
Because as He sleeps, He awakens me.
In His death, He quickens me.
In His pain, I become pain-free.
Thus life will spring forth again this Spring,
through an unrainy, incandescent day.