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And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. (John 12:32)
Perhaps it was the setting, a hospital room when I
couldn’t rest, sleep or find any comfort. Maybe at another time the image, the juxtaposition,
would not have struck me, but lonely hours staring at the ceiling affects your
vision … and opens your heart.
Three parents stared from a silent television screen,
receiving hugs from supporters who visited them in solidarity with their grief
and calls for justice. They will never get it, however. Justice would mean
getting their children back, alive and well. But they are gone, slaughtered in
an elementary school room in Uvalde, Texas, two years ago.
Justice, for them, lies far beyond human reach, in a
realm more gracious than anything we might imagine let alone provide.
For the time being, there is grief, the consolation of
tender hearts and the faint hope that public authorities will hear them and respond
like it was their children who were cut off from their precious lives by
a shooter and his soulless killing machine.
Who knows what beauty and joy would have graced their
families and community through the irreplaceable lives of these children? For
this, we should all grieve. The Holy One gave those lives not just to their
parents, their families and to one Texas town …. but to every one of us.
But it was more than this, more than my frustration of another
night tethered to heart monitors in a hospital bed that moved my tears. There
was an image. Behind the faces on the TV screen, a crucifix hung on the wall over
their shoulders.
My bleary eyes could not make out much detail on the cross.
It looked to be plaster with little color that I could see in the darkness.
But it was just right, in exactly the right place … as if
forces beyond us curated the scene, a juxtaposition of shattered hearts
standing there as the Crucified, arms spread wide by the ugly brutality of this
world, his arms, above and around them … and me in that cursed bed, all of us in
need of healing.
And there he was … and is … and always will be, arms
open, Love giving itself away, refusing to hate, lost in love for a world that
hates far too much and all-too-often.
That’s who Jesus is, the crucified and risen one, Incarnation
of the Love who embraces all that we are, all that we have suffered and
celebrated, all that makes us laugh and cry, enfolding the worst and best of us
in an overflowing triune Love that has neither beginning nor end.
I cannot explain it and am certain I will never have such
wisdom, but I know there is healing in those arms. More than once or twice I
have tasted it, many more. And I know … that plaster crucifix, on a wall
somewhere in Uvalde, Texas, speaks to places in our hearts that only Love can
reach, transforming sorrow into hope and death into life.
In the darkness of night, only a crucified savior will
do. Nowhere is God any greater … than on that cross.
David L Miller
