To Mary: A Love Letter

I did not have to do it.

            I could have stopped at any point along the way.  I did not have to enter Jerusalem.  I did not have to come at all. 

            The angels would have rescued me from the garden if I had asked.  Do you think my father would not have sent them?  Do you think he did not burn with indignation when they spat on my face and insulted me and whipped me?  Do you think he did not want to strike them down?  Do you think he did not wail with rage at the sight of the blood on my back and on my head?  He would have saved me if I had asked.  But I did not ask.

            In the beginning it was not too difficult to bear.  They whipped me: I could withstand that.  They put the crown on my head: I could endure it.  All right, I thought at every step, if this is the worst they can do – surely I can endure. 

Then: the cross.  No one can know how heavy it is.  So much heavier than it looked, impossibly heavy.  But even when they laid it on my shoulder and it pressed against my spine and crushed my lungs and made it impossible to breathe, I thought: I can do this. 
How strange it seemed, to die by wood.  I had worked with wood all my life; it had been my livelihood, had fed my family, had kept me alive – and now wood was to destroy me.  Does it sound odd to you, Mary, that I pitied the tree?  It could have been forged into something beautiful: a table for a meal, perhaps, or a chair, or a chest for a bride.  Instead it had been roughly hewn into this hideous instrument of death.

As I began to walk with the beam on my back, I found myself praying for the tree.  For my father to bless the tree, forgive the tree.  It knew not what it did.  Then, as though rebelling against my prayer on its behalf, the tail of the beam caught on a stone, and I tripped and fell.  The pain - oh Mary, I tell you I did not want to rise. 

            My mother came.  She watched me fall.  When I saw her beloved face, so full of pain – I thought I could relieve her pain, if I were to die now.  Would it not have been an act of mercy for her, to pray not for deliverance, but for death?  I thought to spare her the sight of my suffering.  But she too had suffered, had sacrificed so much.  Her youth, her reputation.  Do you know what poverty she endured for my sake, just so I could be born?  Very few know.  She rarely spoke of it.  Even I only knew in bits and pieces – a reference to a stable, a manger, a voyage to Egypt.  Her hunger and her hope.  Her face was full of grief, but also full of strength.  She was the strongest woman I ever knew, Mary – she had endured so much.  They will not defeat you, my son, her eyes said as they found mine through the dust.  They will never win, not against you.  She willed me to stand, and I had to obey. 

            Simon came.  Ah, that man – he does not know how holy he is.  He looked so terrified, Mary, when they asked him to help me.  Forced him, I should say.  He had come just to watch the spectacle – just for something to do on a Friday afternoon.  He had no idea what would happen to him when he laid his trembling hand on that cross – he thought he was being asked to rescue me, but in the end it was himself he saved.

            There were others, too, who came – the woman who washed my face, the women who wept for my sake.   My friends did not come – Peter, Andrew, Philip, James – all gone. 

I did not blame them for running away.  I wanted to run too.  Imagine, Mary: you’ve been sentenced to death, you are stuck in a prison, and all the while you hold the key to the prison gate!  You are innocent – it is a travesty of justice that you die – you have every right, every right to escape!  And you hold the key!  You finger the key, hefting its weight, sliding your fingers along its grooves, testing it, slipping it into the lock, preparing to turn it – then taking it out, throwing it aside!  Why?  What sane or rational person would do such a thing?    You see it gleaming at you from the filthy prison floor. You pace back and forth, back and forth, but it stares at you, it calls to you. . . That, Mary, that was the greatest temptation: to flee the prison, to take up the key that lay so close. . .

            The irony, my dear: to use the power of God would have been to deny the power of God.
            
Mary, I fell again. 

            I will not say that my agony at that moment was incomparable.  I see so much suffering, Mary; I do not know how to compare.  I see children who are starving with a hunger that I never knew on earth.  I see men and women who are crucified for decades on crosses of cancer and disease.  I see the visions in the minds of those who are haunted by war.  I see destruction and death spreading like wildfire around the world and I look into eyes deadened by suffering and violence and I hear the silent screams of desperate pain aching for salvation.  My hour climbing that hill – my three hours on the cross – yes, they were torturous beyond endurance, but so many are tortured too beyond endurance.  And still they endure.

            I did not want to endure.  I fell, and wood of that rough cross splintered into my bleeding back and my shoulder broke and the thorns were driven into my head and the dust flew into my eyes and I couldn’t see, couldn’t see why I was doing this anymore.  I heard the crowd laughing and I felt the whip on my shoulder and the kicks to my stomach and I could not hear the voice that I used to hear, the one that reminded me why I had come.  Oh Mary, I wished I had not come at all.  There was a drunken man laughing nearby, and I could hear him say: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, he wanted to be a king and have us bow to him – now see, see how he bows to me!”  And in that moment, Mary, I saw the gleam of the key to my escape lying in the dust and I wanted to pick it up – its voice was the only voice I heard. . .

            Then I looked up.

            You know, my love, whom I saw.  Fifty paces to my right, hiding your face behind your shawl – not because you were ashamed and did not wish to be recognized, but because you did not want me to see you weep.  I remembered how that face looked when I first saw it – how disgusting others had found it, tormented and twisted by unknown demons.  You knew only one thing about men, and you sought only one thing from them.  Do you remember when you came to me, offering yourself to me in the only way you knew how?  Oh Mary, even then you were generous, selfless – you wanted to give yourself to something, to someone, but no one had shown you the way!  I took your offer, but not in the way you expected.  I took you, body and soul, and I knew you.  I touched you, and you knew then that love could mean something greater, something better, than what you had ever known before.  And your face became beautiful, Mary – radiantly beautiful, beautiful beyond all reckoning.  I remembered your face as you knelt before me, your tears flowing over my feet.  Your tears - your gift to me - what a precious gift.  They wanted to stop you, to take that moment from you.  But I put my hand on your hair.  I claimed you for my own.

            Mary, I saw your face.   

            In the midst of my loneliness – in the midst of my father’s rage and my mother’s pain, my friends’ abandonment and Simon’s terror, the weeping of the women and the jeering of the men – in view of that gleaming key, waiting for me to snatch it up from the dusty road – Mary, I saw your face, and it was the only face in the world that mattered.

            I stood up, Mary.  I stood and dragged that cross the rest of the way up that cruel hill, I let them strip me naked before your eyes, I let them drive the nails into my wrists – nails thick as branches, nails that cracked bone and split veins.  I drank the vinegar, I let them pierce my side – because I had to save you, Mary.  I saw your face, and I remembered why I had come.  I had come to save you.

Mary – it was because of you.