Walking Through Calvary, St. Ignatius Style Part 7

Thirteenth Station: Jesus is Taken Down From the Cross

Something I remembered from The Passion of the Christ was that after Christ died, they broke the legs of the other two men who were crucified. But instead of breaking Jesus’s legs, the soldier decided to pierce His side with a lance. They say that when Jesus died, the sky darkened and that there was an earthquake. The darkness that covered the sky was, in my headcanon, more than likely a thunderstorm. I remember driving through some serious thunderstorms in the city, storms where the water poured down in sheets and you can’t see more than an arms’ length or so.

So imagine the ground shaking underneath you. Imagine sheets of pouring rain coming down as Jesus is taken from the cross. The body of Jesus is heavy and bloody, even more so from the rain. Mary is crying out in sorrow as are the other women and possibly even John. Do you see yourself at Calvary Hill or in the temple, where the veil was torn in two? Jesus’s death and the tearing of the temple veil happening at the same time is symbolic because through Jesus’s death, the separation between God and Man was finally gone.

Fourteenth Station: Jesus is Buried

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (John 12:24)

So this chapter has come to an end. But as that song from Semisonic goes “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” The burial had to happen quickly because in Jewish tradition, the day begins at night, which meant that the Sabbath was mere hours away. It’s hard to know whether anyone knew what was to come next. The apostles were denser than a brick, Mary is burdened with sorrow, the women are scattered, weeping as they left for their homes.

It also makes me wonder what happened in the Upper Room after Jesus was buried. Maybe tomorrow, we might get a glimpse of that story…