I figure by now it’s safe to talk – that everyone who’s planned to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has done so, certainly by the middle of Holy week.
And because it is Holy week, and the days leading to the celebration of our Lord’s resurrection are drawing near, I have been thinking more than I usually do about the cross.
Not about redemption, propitiation, expiation or sacrifice. Not so much about the eternal and obvious meaning of the cross – but about the actual timber and its awful weight. And the image that is fixed in my mind from the film’s stunning array of imagery is this one: my Lord Jesus carrying the cross. His cross. For a good distance he bore it alone, and then with the help of a passer-by whose name was Simon of Cyrene.
Someone asked this week what my first job was. Since I’ve had several that might have counted as “firsts,” I had to choose one. My first job out of college was as a junior copywriter at an advertising agency. My first job in college was as a television news reporter at a university-owned station. My first part time job in high school was as a checker at a neighborhood drugstore – back when you (and not a machine) had to know how to make change!
But the first job I was ever paid for, I got when I was 13: keeping score at little league baseball games, for $5 a game.
The games never went more than six innings, and were sometimes called sooner because of time. The equipment was simple: a brown, spiral-bound scorekeeper’s book, a sharp pencil and a lawn chair. (Scorekeepers got a free sno-cone at the concession stand after their games were done.)
It was one of those rides you don’t soon forget. The plane was shaking and shimmying and bumping in new and alarming ways – and I hadn’t seen a flight attendant since take off. The “fasten seat belt” sign was still glowing overhead and the passengers who’d resolutely affixed their headphones upon boarding to avoid background noise or unwanted conversation were removing them, in hopes of hearing a reassuring announcement from the cockpit.
Those of us who were trying to look nonchalant (“I’m a seasoned traveler; this is nothing unusual.”) were failing…miserably.
I could see nothing outside the window to either confirm or deny that we were in distress. Truth told, I wouldn’t even know what to look for.