Easter – a time to remember
When I was a boy Easter always had special meaning. It was boiling eggs and coloring them, new spring clothes and going to church Sunday morning and having an egg hunt after the preaching.
The boys would head for the creek just before the basket dinner and the girls, in their swell new getups, stayed behind to help get the food on the tables.
There was a color, yellow, that I always associated with Easter, and now I think more than the clothing it brightened, it was because of the daffodils. To me, the yellow jonquils and Easter are synonymous.
In later years I learned Easter was the Christian celebration for the resurrection of Christ. I think nothing has ever so haunted me as the Easter story. The thing that always hurt the worst was the thought that Mary, the mother, had to undergo the torture of seeing her son crucified.
After I became a writer, I once fell to thinking, "How would I have seen the crucifixion if I had been a reporter then?" And so I wrote a piece called "The Scribe and the Resurrection," which the School of the Ozarks later published as a short book.
The story, while one of my favorites, leaves much unsaid, for its primary concern was the attempts of Jesus' followers to determine the reality of the resurrection.
The resurrection, of course, provides the foundation of the Christian religion and it is beautiful. But the crucifixion still haunts me.
I recall the story of Spartacus, who, before the time of Christ, in 70 B.C., broke out of gladiator training and recruited a slave army. The slaves had little to lose; they either worked on estates throughout their lifetimes with nothing to gain, or they died in the arena. They had little to lose in fighting for freedom.
For two years, Spartacus and his army raged across the length of Italy, defeating the best army Rome had to offer. But following conquests, they found they could not govern, and Rome sent out a new general. Spartacus was killed the first day of battle and his army was finally captured and, historians report, 5,000 slaves were crucified at tape-measured intervals 100 miles along the Aplan Way into Rome.
Crucifixion was resorted to in order to provide a cruel and lingering punishment. Sometimes victims did not die for days and often their legs were broken with crushing blows to enhance the misery. There was much sentiment against crucifixion in Jerusalem at the time of Christ and there was a society of Jewish women who always sent a representative to crucifixions to offer drugged wine to the victims to lessen the suffering.
The crosses were not high, the victims often being no more than three feet off the ground, and the upright timber had a large peg, inserted at the proper height, to serve as sort of a saddle to support the body weight. It was the Roman custom to remove all clothing form the victim but since the Jews objected to public exposure of naked humans, the Romans provided a suitable loin cloth.
I cringe with agony as I think of any human being lifted to the peg, having spikes driven through the sensitive membranes of the palms and feet. As the executioners so pinioned Jesus, how did he endure the pain? How could any man endure the pain?
I marvel at the strength of this man to utter these words: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."
What must have been his emotions as he saw soldiers dividing his sandals, turban, girdle and cloak? As they cast lots for his tunic?
What stormed through his mind as he gazed at his weeping mother and his friends? How did he react as his tormentors ridiculed him? "You who would destroy the temple and build it again in three days, save yourself."
"If you are a son of God, why do you not come down from the cross?"
"He saved others but he cannot save himself."
"He trusted God to deliver him. He claimed to be the son of God. Look at him now, crucified between two thieves."
At one point he said simply, "I thirst." His lips were moistened with sour wine, in those days commonly called vinegar, on a cloth lifted at the point of a javelin.
Even the thieves on either side must have railed at him, mocked him. But at some point of agony one surely mustered his faith to say, "Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom."
And Jesus was moved to say, "I say to you today, you shall be with me in Paradise."
The Apostle John told about the crucifixion as he remembered it, two-thirds of a century later. The other records were based on the recital of a Roman centurion on duty who, because of what he heard and saw, subsequently became a believer.
There has been, I feel, misunderstanding about the utterance of the words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
To some it indicates a plea of despair, a slackening of faith in men. But those words are from the 22nd Psalm.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my roaring?
"Oh my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not, and in the night season, and I am not silent. But thou art Holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel…"
Was not Jesus merely reciting a psalm he had learned as a boy while he endured the final flickerings of the spark of human life?
I wonder what Mary did after her son died? I wonder who comforted her? How long was it before the horror of the crucifixion disappeared from her mind? Could she – did she – hate?
I can see her being led away from the cross, head and face covered with a black shawl, her frail and trembling body supported and guided by loved ones and friends, surely having to cling with all her strength in the faith that had sustained her to this point.
I wonder if she had a garden at her home in Nazareth to tend during her lonely hours after that, a flower bed? And I wonder if, as she saw the flowers die in the fall and spring anew in the growing season, she ever saw a parallel between this death and resurrection, and the death of her son and his resurrection?
I wonder if she had jonquils, yellow and lifting their bright faces to the sky?
