Eyes, Hands Open

I went to a friend’s house this evening ’round 2100 to watch The Passion of the Christ.

When we sat down to watch the movie, I let my friends know that I was prepared to cry. And cry I most certainly did.

Never before have I really connected Good Friday and Easter Sunday with my life: they were all about the ridiculous and secular holiday consisting of rabbits and chicks and new life… all that jazz. But I can honestly say that I haven’t cried quite that much since I broke up with the ex a year and a half ago. While I am not a loud crier (silent and withdrawn… until you see my eyes the next morning. Can you say monumental?! Seriously: I’m talking tennis ball size…) a good solid third of the movie I had tears coursing down my cheeks.

And I saw him whipped and nailed.

Everything that I had solidly built my life upon previously: all the lies that I had built up around negative thoughts and the falseness of easter… it all fell away. And as I got up to leave, I felt such calm. The whole drive back to my house, I was in a daze: eyes staring at the road but not seeing it; rather seeing the body of the man who represented the man who saved me.

This representation that Mr. Gibson felt inclined to portray got into my very soul and picked out the bits of glass and rock and debris that negative moments had thwacked in there. Every horrible thing that anyone had ever said to me; every horrible moment that I had experienced that supposedly made me ‘a stronger person’; every death; every heart break; every moment of injustice; every situation of poverty; every torn person I had ever seen… they flooded into my mind. And I sat there. And I wept. Like

Jesus wept.

And my heart was broken again. Yet, I know it is not in vain because he alone can make good of the wreckage. He alone can fashion something from bits of nothing. He made light. He made trees. He made cantaloupe (oh how I love cantaloupe).

What I do not understand is how we can be faced with the gospel and still be blind. We can stare at the goodness of God every day: all these trees and sunbeams and fruit and still refuse to open our lids to this very complex yet easy concept that he took it. And not just some of it: no. All. Of. It. We’re free.

We need to recognize that we are all dreadfully horrible people… we know it internally and we are broken by it. But that he would care enough to refuse to back down from pain. That he would be shredded of his skin within an inch of his life and still continue to bear the torment we placed upon him. That though everything seemed hopeless, everything seemed useless, every one seemed totally segregated…

It was and they were.

Yet he connected us with God once again.

And I will never look at bunnies and chicks the same way (which was funny because a rabbit was sitting on my friend’s neighbour’s lawn while I was walking to my car). New life is associated with Easter for a reason: we have been allotted another chance: one in which we will never run out of.

We have a chance at life. A chance at time with him in which we can see his mercy in never-ending leaps and bounds.

Gosh, I love Him.