Carrying the Plate: Good Friday

Reflection on the Stations of Jesus’ Life.

Jesus Presented to the Crowd

So it’s him. I’ve been putting the pieces together since this morning. The name keeps coming up in the talk around the barracks. Jesus of Nazareth. There were stories – I’d filed them away the way you file things that don’t concern you. A centurion’s servant healed, the man couldn’t walk and then he could, something about lepers, something about a wedding where the wine ran out and then didn’t. Rumors. Province rumors. I’d half listened.

Now Pilate is making a spectacle of him and I’m standing here not quite able to look away. He’s been flogged. He’s wearing someone’s idea of a joke – purple cloth, thorns pressed into his skull. The crowd is doing what crowds do. And I am watching his face.

He looks like a man who has already been through the worst of himself. Like the real battle happened somewhere else, earlier, in the dark – and what’s left standing here is what remained after that. Not unbroken. But decided. Like he’s the only person here who knows how this ends and has already said yes to it.

Write down the first ten things that come to mind when you hear the name Jesus Christ. Don’t filter it. Don’t build careful sentences. Don’t try to get it right. Just write what is actually there.

Jesus falls

Someone hands me the plate. Three languages. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. I carry it because I’m ordered to and I’m too exhausted to feel anything about it.

The crowd is not tired. That’s the thing. I keep waiting for them to run out – of noise, of invention, of hunger – but they don’t. They find new angles. New ways to twist the knife. Someone shouts something and the ones around him laugh and reach for it, top it, pass it along. They are feeding on this. I can see it. The more he gives them nothing – no reaction, no begging, no collapse into what they want him to be – the more they need. An unsatisfied crowd is a dangerous thing. I know that. I’ve managed enough of them.

But today I am just so tired.

To me, it’s just my job. I carry the plate. I walk the perimeter. I put one foot in front of the other because that is what the training is for – for the moments when there is nothing left in you and the body just continues.

He falls. Right there in front of me. Goes down on one knee, then both hands find the ground. The crowd surges with something that isn’t quite satisfaction – more like relief that something finally happened, something to feed on.

And I remember – one of the stories from the barracks. A man who couldn’t walk. This same man, apparently, told him to get up and he got up. Now he’s the one on the ground.

The crowd is still shouting. I don’t hear it anymore.

I file it nowhere. I just carry the plate.

Where in the world have you grown tired of caring? Which faces, which places, which daily ways of the cross have you learned to step over? Name them today. Carry them in your prayer this Good Friday – not because you feel it, but because you choose to.

Jesus Dies on the Cross

It wasn’t my first. I want to be clear about that. I know how to be present at a death without being inside it. You learn that too, like you learn the night watch. You stay in your training. You don’t let it touch you.

But he was quiet in a way I haven’t encountered. Not withdrawn. Not absent. Just – finished with something the rest of us haven’t started yet. When he breathed his last it was almost deliberate. Like a door closing from the inside.

And then the sky. And the ground moving under my feet.

I have questions. I have so many questions and the only person I would even know how to ask them to is gone. I didn’t look for him when I could have. I filed it all away. Province rumors. Insignificant matters.

Now all I have is questions and a plate I carried that says King of the Jews in three languages and the memory of his face when he wasn’t afraid.

Let us pray:

Jesus, dying on the cross, in your last breath – show me what is no longer breathing in me. What I have grown so used to that I no longer notice its absence. Show me what needs to be found.

More about The Soldier: A Journey from Indifference to Witnessing