The One He Loved (Holy Week series, part 2/5)

The dark day.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

On the night they came to take him away, he did not look like a carpenter. He should have—he didn’t shine, and his feet were dusty on the ground, but his face was too-still, like calmed water, in the flickering torchlight. They waited as Judas kissed him for the change, for the sky to light up again, or the earth to shake.

Instead he went with them. John watched from a distance, all the abuses, and him in the midst of it  

Wine in his glass, still and deep.

“It was water,” they whisper.

At last, they marched him up a hill. When they laid him down, finally, John wanted the miraculous-- one last lit-up sky to snatch him away from the hammer fall. But the sky stayed dim. John closed his eyes when they lifted him up against it.

At the end, John watched life drain away like a kiss on the cheek. All the cracks the dead man on the tree had drawn through his life gaped open like wounds. John felt himself falling through them. His mother wept and John tried to hold her, but he was falling so quickly. The sky darkened and the ground shook, but,

“Too late,” John whispered over the weeping rocks and crashing sky.

He turned away, arm wrapped around the woman who was crying too. His eyes caught those of a soldier, blood flecks drying on his cheek.

“….the Son of God,” John saw him say.

“Too late,” John whispered as he turned away.