It was a cold day, a cold day in April. It was Good Friday. The week had been a normal week, normal in an abnormal way during this time of lockdown. But, it had been a hot and sticky week.
Today was different. As I sat on my front bench I could hear a powerful spring wind blowing. It was not the zephyr of summer, nor a scirocco blowing off a desert, rather, it was a cold and foreboding wind.
Perhaps, this wind was blowing on the day Jesus was crucified. Though men were scurrying about like rats, going about their daily business of buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage as in the time of Noah, strangely, all the noise of these men was drowned out by the sound of a 2.2 pound hammer, this hammer held in the muscled and sweaty hand of one of the four professional executioners, Roman legionaries, driving the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet.
This was Crucifixion Friday, Good Friday, Completion Friday. This was the day that Jesus not only drink the dregs of the cup of sorrow and guilt, the sorrow and guilt of mankind, of me, but also the day in which he could cried “te telestai,” “it is finished.”
True, the work of Jesus accomplishing the finalization of our salvation was finished, but also, it was a time for Him to rest, to rest in the grave. It was the time of darkness, perhaps, represented by the three hours of darkness during the middle of the day.
I am reminded of and convicted by the words of the hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul.”
My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought.
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, o my soul.
On this day here, as that spring wind blew, I perceived that all other sounds were masked by the clank, clank, clanking of that hammer on the iron nails, not unlike the thump, thump, thump, of the beating heart in Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” reminding me of the vision of the blood on Macbeth’s hands after his murder of Duncan in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s eponymous play.
Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
What, indeed, can wash away my sin? – – –
Hark, Resurrection Sunday lies still on the horizon. I wait…
So let it be written, so let it be done.
johnthebaptist15 