Jesus Dies on the Cross
Matthew 27:45-56; Mark 15:33-41; Luke 23:44-49; John 19:28-37
Taking the Middle Seat
by Leslie Fields
Not long ago, on a flight home, I was once again stuck in a middle seat. My seatmates for the next five hours: two large men, one with meaty arms already spilling into my space. I shrank into the seat, avoiding eye contact and deciding whether to take an Ambien.
I didn’t. Nor did I keep my vow to hold silence, as I usually do on long flights. Somehow, I began a conversation with the man on my right. His name was Jerry. We talked about our families, our kids, our work, where we were going that day and why. It was not long into the conversation when he discerned I was a person of faith.
As soon as he heard me say “Christian” he charged in. “I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in any of that hocus-pocus,” he said firmly, shaking his head.
“Really? Wow, that’s interesting. How did you decide that?” I looked at him with curiosity.
He told me he was raised in church. His parents took him to church every time the doors opened. “It’s baloney. All of it. I have a great life. I have a wife and three beautiful grown daughters. I don’t need God. My life is every bit as good as theirs. No, better.”
I listened intently. Before I could think of a single response, he answered my next question: “I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I don’t do debates or arguments. I just know there’s no god.” He smiled at me. I smiled back.
The man on the other side listened to our long conversation in silence. Now he spoke.
“I was raised Baptist. I’m not anything now. I’m not sure what I believe.”
Then, in the next thirty minutes it came out. He had two sons. No, he had one son. The older one died just two years ago. He was bipolar and became addicted to drugs and alcohol, which killed him.
“We tried to help him. We did everything we knew to do. We followed the experts’ advice. But nothing worked.”
We talked for a long time about his son, about grief, about mental illness. I did not mean to cry, but tears came. There was more to his story.
“The week after he died, my wife and I were sitting in the backyard, just empty, hollow. A pair of doves, white doves came to our bird bath. My wife and I had never seen doves there before. Ever. They came and bathed in the water for the longest time, two of them. Pure white. We watched, astounded. Then they flew off. We’ve never seen them again. It was a visit I think, maybe from angels? Maybe it was his spirit?”
“It was a message from God,” I whispered. “Don’t you see? That he loves you and is with you. He never left you, and he never will.”
He looked at me. We sat three inches apart. He nodded. We closed our eyes, hardly able to look at one another in that moment. The man on my other side listened and said nothing.
Every year on Good Friday, we watch a man take that middle space for us, the place no one wants. He will let soldiers stake his palms and feet to a tree. They will hang him between two men—a disbelieving cynic and a recalcitrant thief. He will hang between judgment and mercy, between rejection and adoption, between the past and the future, between law and grace. In that space, he will not shrink, but will spread his arms wide, encompassing all our fear, rebellion, disbelief, our tragic obsession with trivia, and all the death that results.
He will hold us there in that bloody embrace until all is accomplished.
I was with him there that day. And you were too. We were there. In his mind, his heart, our deadly sins, our names on his lips as his life drained out of him. For we have been crucified with Christ, and we no longer live but Christ lives in us. The life we all now live in our bodies, we live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.
Because of that day, because of that man on the middle cross, we can step into dreaded in-between spaces every day: We can love the man on the right who insists there is no God. We can cry with the man on the left who lost his son, who might believe again someday. Because of that day, we are reconcilers, standing where we must—in the midst of those suffering, our arms open to the only way out.