The Cross and the Jungle Gym

Andrew has questions and thoughts about Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as we play on the jungle gym outside the church where his daddy is getting vested for the service. Thursday night, we went to the foot washing service, and watched the altar guild strip the altar down to bare, brown wood while someone read Psalm 22. No music, no gold, no indication that anything would ever happen up there again.

The next morning, Good Friday, was cloudy and windy. I wasn’t sure what to wear—springtime in Texas is unpredictable. The weird, unbidden thought—“what do you wear to a public execution?”

I was still thinking about that on the jungle gym. Drew, newly confident in his ability to scale the thing like Everest, perched on the bars and looked around the neighborhood. The wind was blowing his hair up at a right angle from his forehead, and shaking the pecan trees so shells clattered to the sidewalk.

“I wouldn’t want to go to the cross,” he was saying. “I wouldn’t want to be there.”

Me either, I thought. “Well, they didn’t want to leave him,” I answered.

Even though they’d been up all night, I guessed. But it’s not like his mother had never stayed up late, anxious. He’d been a baby, after all. He’d been a teething six-month-old. He’d had a first day of school.

The gospel of John says that Jesus’ mother was there, and also “his mother’s sister”. Somehow those words meshed with what I was seeing—Andrew in his collared shirt with the dinosaurs on it, in his new khakis, climbing the jungle gym. Jesus’s garment woven without a seam, the ones the Romans flipped a coin for. Who made him that? His mom, his aunt? All the little, practical details of his life—who was in charge of them?

Jesus’ mom…Andrew’s mom. Jesus’ aunt…Andrew has aunts. The red haired one who is always crafting and baking, the bespectacled brunette who chases her own toddlers around all day but remembers to buy him Legos for his birthday, the tall one who nods quietly while he tells her his stuff.

Why go with him to the cross when you can’t do anything? Because you’re waiting for something miraculous? Or just because you can’t possibly leave him? Because you go where he goes. Physically and mentally, you go where he goes.

“Was Jesus handsome?” Andrew asks, awkwardly getting down from the jungle gym and heading for the slide.

“No.”

“Yes, he was!”

“No, the Bible says there wasn’t anything about him that was—,”

“Well, in movies he’s handsome.”

“They just get handsome actors to play him.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like everybody else,” I answered. “Like his mom.”

I’ve seen the pieta, that beautiful sculpture of Mary holding Christ after he’s taken down from the cross. When I saw it in person, I thought he looked too small. Jesus should dwarf Mary, I thought, walking by. But now I see it and I just feel my own son stretched out in my arms. He’s so big, so tall, and getting bigger and taller and older every day, asking smart questions.

I’ve written about Holy Week before, and every year I get something else out of it, like reading a familiar book for the hundredth time. It doesn’t get old—it doesn’t get boring. Every year there’s another face in the crowd around Jesus that stands out to me. And today, it’s all the moms.

Let’s be clear, I’m no Theotokos. I don’t compare myself to any saint. But when I look at the icon of Christ in my husband’s office these days, I see him looking at me with quiet love, not just because he loves me as his own child, but because he never forgot his mother. Even on the cross, he took care of her, while she stood there unable to take care of him.

He sees us both, on the cross and off. He sees us all, and the little practical details that make up our Easter and our lives on Earth. Have a happy Easter, you guys.