On Good Friday

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence

wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.

He creates the universe, already foreseeing

– or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses in God –

the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross,

the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake,

the nails driven through the mesial nerves,

the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops,

the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time,

for breath’s sake, hitched up.

If I may dare the biological image,

God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites;

causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him.

Herein is love.

This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.

-C.S. Lewis

Today we mark and remember the bleakest moment in the Gospel story. Those of us familiar with the story of the Bible have the benefit of knowing that this catastrophe is leading up to the triumph of the Resurrection. But imagine how the Jesus followers of the time must have felt. The world as they knew it, along with their new found faith, was being torn, quite literally, apart. 

I'm glad that I was spared those terrifying moments and days, but how great would it have been to be there come Sunday morning!