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I Saw Him Die

It's Good Friday... The first time in three years that we have been able to have in-person events during Holy Week, and so as a result of deciding to do things differently from before the pandemic, for the first time in 25 years I am not responsible for a Good Friday Service tonight. Instead we had a longer Good Friday Prayer Pilgrimage across our churches in South Belfast this afternoon. As part of the last reflection "at the tomb" my colleague Emily asked if I had a partner-piece to the Easter Day Mary Magdalene monologue I have previously posted. I didn't... I had written one for that point in the story from the point of view of Jesus' mother. But I used that one as a jumping off point and wrote this one instead, which was delivered beautifully by Mel Lyle this afternoon:

I saw him die… He who said he was the way, the truth and the life… the bread of life… the resurrection and the life…

The one who said he was all those things was no more…

The light of the sun seemed as if it had been snuffed out… but the darkness was even deeper than that… Even deeper than darkness of the tomb in which they laid him…

I was there with the other women… With his mother and her relatives… I cannot imagine what she was going through… We didn’t speak… we just watched dumbfounded.

Only one of his male followers, a relative of his, stood with us… the rest had all disappeared… and Jesus asked him to look after his mother… So typical that even at the end he was thinking about others…

How could this man who had brought hope, and healing and life to so many have been snuffed out like a guttering wick in an oil lamp?

He had saved me from the demons that had made my life a misery… But now I can feel them all crowding back in on me again…

Please Lord no! It cannot be true… This cannot be the end… For if it is it is the end of all hope for me… As he said on that cross “It is finished!”

But we didn’t even have time to finish preparing his body for burial. Because tomorrow is the Passover Sabbath the Sanhedrin wanted his body off the cross before sundown… From what I hear if most of them they had their way his body would have been thrown onto the fires in the Gehenna Valley with all the other rubbish… But two well to do members of the Sanhedrin, who I’d never seen before, arranged to have his body interred in a nearby tomb that one of them owned…

We took note of where it was so that we can come back after the sabbath and properly prepare his body… It is the least we can do…

But for now, well we go back to our rooms to carry on with the Passover remembrance… Remembering the time when the Angel of Death spared the firstborn of Israel and rescued them from slavery…

There was no such miracle this time… The angel of death took Mary’s firstborn today… And left us as slaves to despair…

Selah

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