Simon's Crossing

I’m writing this account then because I want to set the record straight. I assure you people would not be making so much of the reported miracles of Jesus if they had followed him, step by step, to his crucifixion on Golgotha. Of course people like to talk. So do I. And almost everyone recognized that there was something different about Jesus. He was hard to figure out. He was hard to put in words. He himself told stories to make his points. So it was natural that people told stories about him and passed them down, and around. These stories even took on a life of their own, and seemed to work on people in the most subtle of ways. Stories told by others were attempts to figure him out. Most everyone agreed that he seemed to have some mysterious power to make people and their world better. But the stories were not the main focus. What they pointed to about him was the point. That was what mattered. You could trust him to absorb in his love the incredible evil and destructiveness that it was his lot to encounter, even create. He had room for it, for it all. That, of course, is what is miraculous since most people, including myself, have developed other, shall we say, less than noble ways of dealing with life’s difficulties. Only later, for example, did I realize that he surely knew, when I had wandered lost into that crowd that I was on the run from the pain of my wife Pricilla’s death. He took that along with him to his death, or so I came to understand as I followed him along, helping carry his cross. Yes, he was different. I want to tell you though that he was different in that he was so fully like us. I’ve never met someone so fully human. You’d think he was the most ordinary person you’d ever met in how he received his suffering and final death. Not too different from the criminals hanged on the crosses next to him. He didn’t try to avoid what was given him to live and to do. How can you be fully human when out of the fear, let’s say, of dying, you figure ways to escape, or to numb yourself to that realization? Separating yourself from your own fears, or withdrawing from others, or running from God’s presence are merely temporary ways of escaping that part of our humanity which requires we live toward our mortality as well. We become less than human. He didn’t do that. I was there to witness that. In the process, something of my own nature shifted, became more acutely alive. His crucifixion enlivened me.