Get Out Of Jail Free

At Bible study, the question was asked, "Could Jesus have come down from the cross if he wanted to? Or, was he unable to save himself?"

Most everyone opted for the first, that Jesus could have come down from the cross but chose not to do so. There is certainly a lot to support that view.  

The Bible says that Jesus had the power to still to wind and the waves.  Jesus could drive out demons, cure diseases, restore sight to the blind and even raise the dead. It's only logical to believe that this power would be at Jesus' disposal when Jesus needed it most...to save himself. On the order of things that Jesus had already done, coming down off the cross was pretty small potatoes. A no-brainer, really.

I remember sitting by the hospital bedside of an elderly woman once, who provided sole care for her learning-disabled brother. Even though she herself got around with a walking frame. She'd been a widow for 18 years, never had children, and she and her brother were all the family they had left.  

She lay in the hospital bed physically exhausted, and worried sick. What would happen to her brother if she died now? He would not be able to stay on his own. All they had was each other. He would have to be put in a home and that would most certainly kill him.  She couldn't bear the thought.

No, she had to live and return home to care for him, but whether she lived, or died that very night, was beyond her control.  She knew it. All she could do was cry some hard angry tears. That always struck me as a pretty good definition of being human.  

Being human boils down to exercising control over everything — except the thing we need most. Being human means coming face to face with our ultimate vulnerability, our utter lack of power over anything and everything that really matters.  

Every Sunday we confess in our church that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Is humanity something you can step in and out of at will?  Like a pair of slippers or something?  I suppose we try often enough, in all the little games we play as people, the schemes we hatch trying to play God.  

But ultimately, being human comes down to this moment. Desperately needing what we are helpless to acquire for ourselves.   

Oh, I'd like to think that Jesus had a "Get Out Of Jail" card in his back pocket, and that he could use it if things got too unbearable on that cross.  I like to think I have one too. I suspect otherwise though, when I remember that woman staring at the ceiling, facing an unimaginable future for the brother she loved that she was powerless to control. Or, as I recall my own mother and all of my family gathered helplessly around my father's dying bedside, being dragged helplessly into a future we prayed mightily to be spared.  

I remember the elderly woman recovered and returned home to her brother. How relieved she was when I drove her to their farmhouse.  I took a new church sometime after, and I never found out how it ultimately turned out for them. Maybe the brother died first and the woman's unimaginable future became her own. I suspect they needed each other to survive, and neither of them could make it alone. Maybe they went together, or maybe they're still in that farmhouse.  I don't know.  

I do know that it's been more than 10 years into that unimagined future after they unhooked my father from all the machines and monitors and we left the ICU for the last time under an incredibly starry night sky. The path we've walked since that night has been a well-travelled one. Full of heavy stones and lots of broken glass. I've met hundreds of others on it. It doesn't lead to oblivion, or the realization of my worst fears, though at times it sure feels like it. But here’s the thing, just when it does feel like the end, there's this sharp bend at a blind curve that runs you right through Good Friday, a hill called Golgotha with three crosses on it. That's where Jesus is waiting for us and he's rolled some really heavy stones out of the way.

Not to worry though, it's all in the wrists.