Hanging on a Tree: A Poem for Good Friday

Our Jesus?

Hanging on a tree
From a distance we see
The Infinity reduced to finality
The Emblem of our collective hostility
Hanging on a tree

For all to see our misplaced hope
Our ill-placed means to cope
with our fate, enwrapped in darkness’ cloak
The future; fractured.  Cut off from hope
Like Judas: desperately looking for an out, coming to an end with his neck in a rope
All that’s left is this suffocating choke

Jesus’ body, with our longings, in the air suspended
We had left our belongings for this… For this man, we had defended
all that we are… But now, our dreams are tattered strands, I cannot tie them back together – they’ve ended

His wrists, His feet, His body rent
He is soaked in blood, and our hearts are turning to flint
And we decry, was it for this tree He was sent?

Our King?

Now a scene with a sign: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”
Oh, in this we muse
You are mocked and reduced
We see Your body, humiliated.  Nails in your hands and feet, naked and abused
Of criminal treachery accused
But perhaps too:
The great King and the suffering Servant, fused?

But how could this be? By men you were defiled
Mocked, blasphemed and reviled
Even from God, exiled
On You our weight of grief is piled

You are the Resurrectionist
Exchanged for an insurrectionist
Oh, the injustice of this
We lament, asking what the point of it is
When evil is called, “good,” and conceit is dismissed
Betrayed of a kiss…
Or was it of Satan’s hiss?

Our Savior?

We had hoped you would do more than die.
We had hoped that our lives would be more than death…
So now, we look from a distance and cry:

“He saved others; won’t He save Himself?” Be free!
“If only He’d come down, then we’d believe.”
As though You were a sideshow, “I got my front row seat”
As though victory is displaced in defeat
As though triumph is lost on the grieved
As though comfort runs from us who flee
As though blessing rejects bended knee
As though God is deaf when we scream
As though power is self-sufficiency
As though all is lost in humility
Will the blind ever see?

How could the Son of God die?   
If God is good, how can bad things happen to good people?
Is it pie in the sky, some intricate lie?

If God really cared for us,
He would have spared us. 
Protected us from messes,
for He only blesses us, the throng...

The darkness has proclaimed this same message all along:
“Victory is to the strong”
“In strength you belong”
“We want your merriment and song”

“Take all for which you long”
“Check your troubles at the door”
“We want the façade, not the core”
“The rich, not the poor”
“Do what you got to do, be the carnivore”

But in the cross, there is so… much… more

For in His tree there really… actually… is a song
A melody that tunes to our patterns of pain, a frequency that envelopes our existence, within which we long
for a point to our scars, a place where they belong

We are longing for more than a trivial pursuit
More than covering our shame in a power suit
More than feeling like this pain inside is best muzzled, mute

In His death there is a seed
A “welcome” to us who bleed

Your cross, Jesus is the great articulation
It shakes the earth, shaking us with the message: “God knows our deepest sorrow, our overflowing consternation”
Because here You are, the God of all things hanging on a tree: The God of Aberration.
You having wounds, too, scars on your hands and feet.  An eternal marking at your side.  When I come close to you and touch them… and I run my hands along them, their texture is my consolation.

The hope for me
Is that You work a profound arborology
So, it’s from this distance I am beginning to see your tree
What it means to be free…
what it means to be scarred…
to be me.

Our Hanging Christ

We see you on the tree and lament
Though maybe the cross is what you meant
In weakness you were sent
From prestige you bent
To embrace a world, out of control, in descent
Even to us, from these people, descendants
So that in our own pain, we can experience Your broken transcendence.

In our sorrow and pain
The contour of your scars reign
But for now, it is to death that you're fain
And so, we look on You in anguish and pain.

From a distance we see
The Infinity reduced to finality
The Emblem of our collective hostility
Hanging on a tree