All the careful, distinguishing detail—
all the detail
in which the Gospel writers
tell their stories of Jesus’ judicial murder—
arrives at a common silence:
When the procession—Jesus;
the scattering of disciples, mostly women,
who would have been waiting outside Pilate’s headquarters, sick,
not knowing what was happening until he emerged with the crossbeam;
his executioners; the military and religious functionaries—
when the procession arrives at Golgotha,
and all of the accounts simply say “they crucified him.”
The whole process of breaking a human being onto pieces of wood.
The tools of it. The executioner’s craft. The flinching outcry of nerves.
All of that, disappears within a
verb.

“They crucified him;” they made him into a dying person.
And I am struck by the ordinariness of it—
how the act of crucifixion itself required no explanation,
the particular experience of a person merited no elaboration,
because if you had seen one person tortured like this,
you had seen them all. Flesh is flesh.
The instinct to survive is what it is.
Nails are nails.
Jesus enters a horrifying
commonplace.

John tells us that a handful of women
came to stand near the cross
— his mother, his aunt, Mary Magdalene.
This is nearly the last, before Jesus turns away from earth:
he looks at them.
He sees his mother, looking at him.
He watches her, watching him
breath out the life that had bloomed in her body.
They are entwined in this pain;
their gaze is an exchange of sorrow,
a bottomless wound.

This is how God,
the Mother of creation,
has always watched her children.
Near. Willing anything to make it stop.
Refusing to look away.