In the Crook – by Kerri Lynn

I make my way to him, stealthy and slow, tiptoeing through the strange, cloying dark of an eclipse – a lost sun. I avoid the bored soldiers that stand around, making bets, waiting for him to die with the same ambivalence they would any criminal.

The crowd of people surrounding this hill are no more than a mixture of silhouettes in the dark, their humanity lost in the shadows. I don’t have the capacity to deal with them right now, the disheartening reality of us when we become a mob. So I steer clear of the die-hards, those that have nothing better to do than be here, joking amongst themselves and taunting him now and then, trying to get a reaction out of him, something to entertain.

And I stay far, far away from Mary and his brothers – those that stand still and silent, eyes pinned to him. Even from the corner of my eye, I can see their bodies are etched in pain, leaning towards the crude slash of wood in the sky, waiting with him for the end. Those ones have too much loss on their faces. Too much desperation. For me this is an old story already finished. I know the ending. For them it’s a horrible nightmare they never saw coming and can’t stop. Is it worse to be in the trauma or to be witness to it, helpless to stop it? I can never figure out which.

Why should I come to him now, in this place? I never come to this story. It’s one of my least favorite with the long shadows it casts on humans, the pat answers I’ve listened to over the years; the overdone preaching that makes it both hard to swallow and easy to forget. It’s the one spotlight the loudest Christians like to sit in, making him only about this moment, this act done to him and yet somehow chosen. So many preachers love to shine a light on how wicked humanity is – that we would do this to him, to each other. There’s just a little too much glee about our sin, and alternatively sometimes too much defeat.

But here I am anyway. Unable to stay away today.

I near the coarse beam, and I don’t look up right away. I don’t even touch it as I stand there, my eyes firmly on the ground, on the pebbles beneath my feet. I can hear him above my head. Long slow breaths of drowning. It makes my chest ache.

I was tired of feeling sorry for myself today. Weary down to my bones of the boulder in my stomach, the knot in my throat I can’t seem to swallow away – the tears that hover behind my eyes with every encounter. My over bright smile and fake small talk. The panic I feel when someone meets my gaze.

I don’t know why he brought me here, to this story. What good can it do?

His presence pulls at me, though. And so I climb. I’m only a thought right now. Just a wisp of imagination, a hovering presence of spirit, perhaps, so it’s not like my weight will shift this awful piece of wood, or injure him further. But I think of it anyway, squeezing my eyes closed as I near him, as I feel the struggle he’s in. His arms are stretched out and taut – strong ropes of muscle that strain but still hold him up under the unimaginable weight pressing down on him. Even wrecked and nearing death his form is so dear to me. It doesn’t matter what his features look like or how they’re arranged. He is so much my home. I know him most often as complete, as what’s beyond this moment, on the other side of it. But he’s beautiful as a human, full of the art of a Creator. Even covered in blood, sweat, and grime.

I curl myself into my favorite spot – the place where his shoulder meets his neck – the crook of him. It always makes me picture the sturdy curve and tug of a shepherds hook around a lamb’s belly. I am just a small, weary thing now, hardly a breath, centuries and ages away from the physical reality, the time that he’s in, and I am silent, holding my breath, aching to lift his chest for him, inflate his lungs, help hold up his arms, ease the pressure on his feet.

His head droops forward, trying to keep the long sharp talons of his mockery of a crown from being shoved further into his skin by the wood behind him. His chest lifts and falls with such effort.

Despite the trauma – the narrow tunnel that pain puts him in – he senses me there.

Like he always does when I need him.

He turns his chin, just slightly, so that his cheek grazes mine. He knows my suffering. Even here in his own. We’re together in it, the two of us. A sob nearly makes its way out of me at the compassion in him, the love. After I accused him of leaving me. The way he pulls me in to him, always, always.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

His voice is low and rough and loud as he groans it out, his whole chest heaving to put those words into the air. I am startled and shaken at the effort, at the slash of those words through the quiet; it’s as if he’s read my mind, taking my sense of abandonment and feeling it with me, for me. Tears instantly pour down my cheeks. The cry in his words, the reaching out of them… my eyes slam shut, I press my cheek against his, the water of tears between us, wishing he didn’t feel it, while at the same time all of me glad that he does. That he knows.

His voice fades instantly in his weakened state. “Say it with me, Ker,” He murmurs, his voice no more than a breath against my ear, an entreaty to help him finish the psalm he’s started quoting from memory.

My throat closes tight around a knot of grief. But I struggle against it, forcing it back.

“Why are you so far away from helping me, from the words of my groaning? I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”Psalms 22

The words come angry and anguished, a familiar phrase I’ve prayed over and over again in the past few weeks even if the words aren’t identical. Twin strands of grief and love tighten around my heart as I keep my gaze from wandering down the road that brought me here, to the line of his chin, the curve of his collarbone and the blood that ribbons down his cheek. I don’t want to lose myself in my own pity again, I want to stay with him. Even if it’s here.

Only a few days ago I told a friend and mentor that I didn’t want him to suffer with me. That it didn’t help.

Jesus’ eyes hold mine and I know what he’s asking, what he’s doing, and so we go over the lines of what David wrote so long ago. Psalms 22. A scripture he has kept in his pocket to bring out and hold whenever the darkness gets too deep. And I realize David is here too, somehow, an ancient witness in this moment, his shoulder under Jesus’s, sharing what Jesus is feeling, having poured it out on paper and through voice for Jesus to hold. I wonder if Jesus can hear him singing it in his mind, can feel David’s love.

He’s looking back, over the vast years of a story between God and humanity, pulling to his mind and heart the men and women who loved and fought to trust in his dad back then, before the promise of Jesus became reality. He’s recalling what his dad did through all those stories and events. And he’s asking me, with every struggling breath, to remember it with him, how they cried out and found an answer over and over again. How Jesus’s dad saved them again and again. It strikes me suddenly, how he’s thinking. The familiarity of his thoughts – a reaching out for his dad’s hand, as if he’s a child again. Pain does that I guess. Makes us children. Desperate for safety.

“I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others and despised… mocked,” His mouth is still moving over David’s words, his lips parched, his eyes a gleam of unending loneliness and pain. I think the two men that hang on either side of us somehow hear him, their faces turned towards us, though I can’t read what’s in their eyes. They too, are no strangers to being scorned and despised.

My heart jolts in my chest as he continues to mumble, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax… my mouth is dried up… you lay me in the dust of death.” His words are more breathed than spoken now, as tiredness weighs him down even further and his chest fights to rise. No one in the crowd can hear him. I wiggle closer, burrowing into that crook, as he aches for the both of us.

Tears stream down my cheeks, unceasing. Here he is, my favorite person in the world. And he won’t let me keep my pain from him, he makes me give it – piling it on shoulders that carry the world already.

“Say it for me, Ker.” He whispers then, his body’s strength all but done, his voice deep inside my heart. His quiet asking makes me want to wail, but I don’t.

“But you, O Lord, do not be far away.” I breathe against his neck, my voice hitching, “O my help come quick.” I stumble to a halt, knowing how this ends, “Deliver my soul from the sword…save me…” My words strangle themselves in my throat, I squeeze my eyes at the image of the sword that will soon pierce his side. I already gave up asking God for help, lost my faith in just a few weeks of pain, but here Jesus is at the end of all things, still reaching for his dad.

Jesus’s breath sounds in my ear, “For,” He breathes, when I can’t continue, straining to get it out, the most important part that he wants me to hear,

“he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted;

he did not hide his face from me,

but heard me when I cried to him.” He finishes the quote and the breath and his body slumps. He is still, and quiet and I can’t feel his presence on this cursed wood anymore. It is done.

He is so unwavering, my Jesus. So full of steadfast faith in the character of his dad; in Love. And he’s so willing to be faith for me, when I have none left. To put me in that crook of his and carry me. To prove to me that I am not alone and never have been. And neither have you.

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Published by kerrilynn123

Writer, author, nature lover. “I am passionate about stories and the power of words.”

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