Good Friday

Day 39: Friday, April 10, 2020

The sun glinted off the aquamarine blue water of the Sea of Galilee. I was standing on a grassy hill just down a flower-lined trail from the Church of the Beatitudes. Looking over the beautiful scene, I could think of nothing more than why would Jesus ever have wanted to leave this place. Why would he turn his face toward Jerusalem? Oh, I know I voiced the question rather facetiously, because not only was Jerusalem the center of the Jewish faith, but also Jesus knew that his mission in the world was to be fulfilled at the center of that faith, not in the rolling hills up from the lovely lake.

Even as Jesus turned his face towards Jerusalem, so did our tour group turn ours towards the city that held the temple, the place where all the religious leaders of Jesus’ day were headquartered. As I walked through the old city, my feet touched the ancient Roman stones that Jesus’ feet would have touched as well. The city definitely was not beautiful like the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings were. It was, instead, impressive. Massive white stones tumbled all over the site of Herod’s temple. All of the modern structures, too, were made of the white, heavy stone. It had gravity. Somehow, it exuded authority.

As I walked the streets, following the Via Dolorosa that Christ had walked so long ago, the bright sunlight and intense heat of the crowded way, dropped away from me as I imagined what those streets had been like on that first Good Friday. Of course, nothing about that day could have been called “good.” Jesus had been held in two different locations as he was being “tried” by the authorities and brought before Pontius Pilate. The second location was a dungeon, cold, damp, dark. When I was there with my church group, we had a wonderful time of singing a hymn, saying a prayer, and celebrating our faith. The night Christ spent inside those stone walls, he was alone, already beaten and exhausted from the all-night badgering he had endured.

And so as I walked the old worn stones, I could trace where Jesus had walked that day, where he had fallen, where he had encountered his mother, where Simon from Cyrene had been compelled to carry the cross that Jesus could no longer lift.

Strangely enough, the most moving image of Christ that I saw was not in the old city of Jerusalem nor on the beautiful hills of Galilee. Instead, it was I the ruins of the city of Capernaum. Close to the entrance to the national park is a park bench on which a life-size bronze statue lies. It’s quite obviously the figure of a homeless person who has nothing but a hooded cloak to wrap around his body.

But, then, just as I was about to pass the end of the bench, I saw the feet. These were not the feet of the Christ that had walked the earth; these were the feet of the Christ that had hung on that cross on the first Good Friday—there were gaping wounds on the top of each foot. The sculptor Timothy P. Schmalz perfectly captured the nature of our Savior. Not in the triumph of the resurrection, but in the utter humility and abject loneliness of the man who suffered on the cross, I saw the incredible unconditional love of God in the form of man.

Note: I want to acknowledge that I was prompted to write this essay after listening to one of my memoir writers read her essay on her visit to Jerusalem. Our content is very different, but I’m not sure I would have recollected all of this on this day without having heard her reflections.