Being in agony Jesus prayed more earnestly; and his
sweat was as if it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. These words come from last evening’s story;
Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jesus’s sweat
was like blood. This can happen in times
of great anxiety; that blood does mingle with sweat as blood vessels constrict
under the pressure of stress and then rupture. One then sweats blood.
I was there,
in the Garden. I was there with Jesus
through the night, and I was there today on the cross.
It was not
just his sweat that turned heavy and changed…I changed, me a tear, changed.
My substance
turned thick and heavy; large drops hanging off the eye lids and making great
puddles.
Jesus cried
the weight of the world in his tears.
In those tears
were held myriads of cries: those of Coptic Christians bombed in Egypt, Syrian
children dying from chemical weapons, Africans starving from ravaging drought,
refugees seeking a place to call home, and those caught in random acts of
terror or crossfire. Multiply this week in the news, by every week…that is how
heavy Jesus’s tears were.
From the
Garden to the cross, tears rolled darker.
Jesus wept until there were no more tears to cry. Jesus’s final tear -final cry- was that of
abandonment, “my God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?” With this he breathed his last; and God had the final
tear…
It was beyond
heavy. It was saturating, drowning; it
had each person’s name on it, every creature remembered. The tear was the life
of the world: that which was, that which is, that which is yet to be.
As God died, one
final tear fell to the earth.
As it fell,
the energy tore the Temple curtain in two, and the sky turned dark. The earth shook with its impact. The world
was drowned in a tear.
It was not
just a simple tear. The tear was completely
weighted by love.
The world was
flooded in God’s redeeming act; bathed in love.
The thing is
it takes time for the tear to soak in. – for the flood to subside.
In tears of
sadness, facing the agony of the cross, in seeing God’s suffering; we are left drowning
in a puddle of love. Washed in God’s tears.
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