Today is Easter Saturday.
Logically, this is the darkest day of the Christian calendar, because this is the day when Jesus is dead.
The horrific cost of the Cross has been borne; the shock and overwhelmed grief of witnessing His last breath has been felt.
Good Friday’s goodness has been poured out to the last bitter drop. It is finished.
Saturday dawns: the most hopeless new day ever experienced in God’s Creation.
Followers of Jesus scatter or hide, their euphoric anticipation utterly crushed by pain and replaced by relentless fear.
Of course, we experience both Good Friday and Easter Saturday as aberrations made meaningful by Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Christians are definitionally resurrection people, walking in the daily reality of a living Lord!
I would even argue that discipleship is walking with Jesus, Who is Immanuel – God With Us – the One Who will never leave us orphaned.
This Easter Saturday, I am mindful of one disciple who missed Easter Sunday. A disciple who opted out of the story before the pivot from despair to radiant joy; a disciple whose fate would be yours and mine, except for the resurrection.
Grateful that this is NOT our story, I offer the following poem as a reminder of just how precious our “ordinary” is, thanks to our Risen Savior.
Hekeldama
A poem of Judas on Easter Saturday
I was with him all the while:
The parted sea, the cripple walking,
The thousands of empty bellies filled,
I saw them all. I heard him talking
and I believed – almost – that he was the answer.
He had the power, that much was clear.
Would he use it to effect?
Would he bring his Kingdom near
in all the ways I wanted most?
Dominion over Rome, to start,
and every last oppressor rooted out, made to pay;
every single quaking heart
consigned to appropriate depths
while those of us with courage, with zeal,
with vision for the grand design,
lifted up so high that we could feel
the very breath of God?
Would he?
Dust.
That was my answer: dust.
Mouthfuls of grit as we walked endlessly
and he talked endlessly. He must
have known my frustration
(he knew me, that was one of the hardest parts)
but he persisted in attending to little people
making little hopes and dreams and hearts
the substance of those three long years.
Impatience turned to outrage turned to hate
but I followed anyway
surmising much too late
the only way to save him was by pushing
him across that boundary he resisted:
that line into significance.
Why else had he existed?
It wasn’t the silver – I could get that anywhere.
It was a bet I made with God:
that thugs and tyrants, condemnation,
torture – pain would prod
the chosen one into relevance,
into action. That humility would finally cede
the floor, and glory burst – triumphant –
and I, by his side, succeed
In proving I was right about him.
I never intended… I never wanted…
I never considered his death.
How could I have thought of that?
I knew the healing miracle his breath
brought to the bodies of others.
How could he die? Impossible. A lie.
But he did. And it was I
who put him on that cross.
I who forced the end, the loss;
I who brought the darkness down,
and I who bought my own renown:
Traitor. Murderer. Thief
of hope; eclipser of belief.
Stuck with blood money in my hands,
innocent blood on my hands, forever.
No possible release from the shame.
Consigned to knowing I never
could make it right again.
And you are just the same
as me. You make him in the image
of your own desires and hope.
You worship what you want from him;
you limit the scope
of what he can ask of you
because it’s what you ask of him that matters.
And whether it is riches or fame or the heads of prophets on platters
served just for you, you kill him, too,
with expectations he never intended to fulfill.
You ask me if I love him still
and I point to the ending I choose now.
(Is there a way to live without him? I don’t know how.)
So I will dangle from a tree
this husk that’s left of me
and spill my polluted substance
on the dry ground of the potter’s field.
Hakeldama, harvest of blood;
I am a foreigner for all time. The only yield
Oblivion.
