Christ the Flower

A meditation for Good Friday. 

Once upon a time there was a forest full of trees, but it wasn’t so much The Trees as this One Tree that caused the trouble. You know the story. The garden, woman, man, and fruit. Serpentine transgressions. I wonder, when they would look back on the events years later, were they haunted by the what fors and whys? Or the absence thereof. It’s hard to even tell from here just what it was all about. Was it gluttony, lust, or pride, I wonder? Poisoned peek a boo with God. Selective hearing, maybe. Exile, swords of fire.

A friend tells, “avocado.” Avocado? Yes, he says, the fruit that undoubtedly, to his mind, marked the sin. He was probably projecting, but I sometimes ask myself what fruit would be shiny enough, just ripe enough, enticing enough that I would dismiss, neglect, put down God’s voice of love to me.

Well before too long, the man and the woman were themselves made fruitful, found with child, but that had long stopped being an obvious good thing. The hiding from God had hit them hard. And without clear means for mending, their offspring hit each other harder. Whole cities built on the blood of brothers. And it’s fruit again, the parent’s sin, the cry of Abel’s blood. And Abel’s blood’s still crying. Good God, is Abel’s blood still crying.

And every night on channels one through ninety-nine, hell, any screen you carry to the toilet or wherever else you go, you can see him, hear him, they call him different names now, but you can still hear Abel’s blood. And it’s the echo coursing through the whole Hebrew Scriptures. Where it’s Abram and Sarai, Moses, Elijah, Deborah and David, Elisha, Esther, and Jonah, God bless him, and Nahum and all of God’s prophets, his judges and kings, the high priests of the people, trying to give God back Abel’s blood.

Sometimes I pray when I hear it, and sometimes I laugh when I hear it; other times, when I hear it, I sink into my sofa and drip through to the floor, the weight of the sadness slaying my tears and as heavy -- oh, as heavy -- as the endlessly flickering light is blue against the wall.

They sprinkled blood, not Abel’s, on their beaten, wooden, doorposts that first, last night called Passover; that first last night in Egypt, just as God commanded. Prefigured Lamb of God. The Egyptians were howling; God, he was faithful, and the Hebrews walked out on dry land. Pillars of cloud. Columns of fire. God broke the bondage. And the Hebrews walked out on dry land.

But college freshman everywhere will tell you, when they’re talking to you at all, that unexpected freedoms are the hardest kind to handle. And the people who walked free from their mud bricks in Egypt had a hard time believing that the One who had freed them from their mud bricks in Egypt, would keep them, could keep them, from their mud bricks in Egypt. That they would be cared for. That God would bring them home.

And so, in an ironic twist, somewhere along the wandering road, somewhere among the endless, numbered, days that followed, the people who wandered in wilderness griped one time too many, and God brought back the snake. You know, the one that started the whole mess in the first place. He brought him back. With friends. Snakes to bite their heels. Some were even dying.

Moses said, “Have mercy, God,” and God heard and had mercy, had Moses make a separate snake, this one made of bronze, and put it on a pole; the people were told to look on the snake on the pole in order to be saved. And the ones who did were saved. And some millennia later, the disciple Jesus loved, the one called John, he saw that snake, and called it Christ. The sinless one becoming sin, that we might see salvation.

Which brings me to a second tree that caused the trouble. One tree from the forest. You know the story. A garden. A man. With some women and men. Where they found him, with their swords and flaming torches. Does this sound familiar? Exiled Son of God. Or at least that was the goal.

The disciples had swords, too, but there would be no battle here. No second spill of Abel’s blood. The cup first drunk at Passover, now come before the Lamb. And Peter, who would have fought for him, would not, will not, die with him, and the cock crow names the hour.

They gave the man a trial, the people did. Or close enough to one for their intentions on that day. And they dressed him like a king, and pranced before the powers, and the powers lost their power in the madness of the night. The night as dark as blood. The day that looked like night. And they crucified our Lord.

Once upon a time, this mother, she could smile. But darkness knows no friend.

Two trees by which to see the grief, to hear the cries and taste the blood of wars that will not cease. The rivers flowing blood. Infernal blue lights flickering. But eyes to see and ears to hear pick out the pin-prick hope against the darkness, amidst the blood, if faint, if far off, flickering. And this is the pin-prick hope -- God’s own happy sadness – this is the moment, the instant we see it, when despair itself loses hope -- this is God’s secret: the two trees are one tree and his wounds heal the first.

Christ the flowering blossom of the tree we left for dead. Christ the first flower of creation made new. Christ, that flower which, trampled underfoot by us, did not withhold its fragrance, but poured it out all the more. In him, this one, the love and logic of God, the grain of the universe, all revealing. Where there, in God’s heart, it is mercy and mercy all the way down.

The flaming sword extinguished now, Life’s tree holds high its fruit; and Christ himself, pressed, crushed, for us, becomes the very wine of heaven.

And heaven prepares the song.

Amen.