What Happened?

What just happened?
What would the crucifixion scene look like if we did not come to it with an already fixed orientation to The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ? For us, the retelling of this event commences the observance of Holy Week—a meditation on redemption as prelude to celebrating resurrection. However, what if all we know is the arrest and arraignment, the torture and execution? Would it be an event lost in history’s forceful flow of orchestrated bloody endings; one more soon forgotten statistic? Just as any number of infants named Jesus could have been born around the same time as was our Jesus of Nazareth, so too, thirty three years later, his violent death could have been and was but one more of many convenient murders.
What would the scene have been like for those who had followed this man in whom they had placed their trust? Would they have been horrified? Perhaps not horrified, given the condition of the world; still, they must have been stunned that the killing day had actually, finally, arrived. As much as they had hoped he would be the “One” they could trust to usher in a new way of living, they also hoped that the seeming inevitable would not come to pass—that his message and very person wouldn’t rile the powers-that-be into plotting his demise!

Therefore, it is likely they knew the cross was coming. These folk, after all, were not sheltered from the ways of the world. They might have been herded into living on the margins of society but their past and present were smack in the center of oppressive power’s rage. Their horror was not the surprise but the realized tragedy of torture perpetrated upon one who had taught, among other things, “Love your enemy.” No, this scene was not lost on them. Vulnerable, they felt his suffering; and they felt the morbid misgiving of their own pain—the devastating confirmation that to hope in the Name of the Lord is a temptation, a demonic temptation that repeats a history of crucified hope. The arrest, under cover of darkness, is how duplicitous power claws at anything in its path. The trial had been yet another not even thinly veiled mockery of justice; and crucifixion was already the established and efficient means of naming and either neutralizing or eliminating anyone who could be framed as a threat to the status quo—a proven way of regulating the masses.
Some who had followed would have felt the fool for having allowed him to become (or for allowing themselves to believe he was) the flesh and blood fulfillment of promise. His flesh torn and blood let, the buzzard passers-by scavenged for words: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, get yourself off the cross…. He was going to save others; he cannot even save himself… Hosanna Hah!”

Others, who had followed, trembled:
Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble.
I should leave this scene of death. Fear is all around.
They’ll next come looking for those who were with him.
I have become a reproach to all my enemies and even to my neighbors. They see me; they avoid me.
I’m good as dead.
He called out for God and now he’s dead.
God? My God! I better get away from here.
What the eye has seen and the throat chokes down, now quakes in the belly—
a consuming sorrow;
a cry, this vessel shattered into shards;
useless to gather up the pieces…
I am as useless as a broken pot.