A meditation on John 19:17-27.
It’s perhaps not surprising but still striking that after the men in this terrible story are done betraying Jesus, denying Jesus, judging and condemning Jesus, rejecting him, mocking him, cursing him, flogging him, torturing him, on the way to executing him, that it is the women of the story who stand there, silent sentinels and witnesses to this scene of human brutality and tragedy. The women and the one John calls the beloved disciple are all that remain to be present at Jesus’ final moment; everyone else whom Jesus called friends just a few chapters earlier, those who pledged their lives to Jesus through thick and thin, have scattered, part of that larger group of people who skirt the stark reality of the end of a human life by betraying, denying, judging, cursing and mocking, playing games as if that were a way to whistle away the sounds of a man’s life draining away. But these four, three women and a beloved man, stay with Jesus to the end, stand at the foot of the cross, perhaps holding each other to keep each other from falling down in shock and grief. And there, in the midst of this scene of utter horror, of a mother, an aunt, friends watching their beloved not only dying but dying through terrible suffering, in this nadir of human experience, there are final gifts bestowed, the gifts of the dying and of those courageous enough to witness death.
Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. These are what Dr. Ira Byock, one of the leaders in palliative and hospice care, calls the four things that matter most. These eleven words—Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you—constitute the heart of restored relationship and deep reconciliation between people, even and especially those we love most, those we love most and perhaps those whom we often take for granted. These are the words that matter most when when we are cast into the gauntlet of death. These eleven words, these four things, no matter how they are uttered, what words are used, or whether words are used at all, are the gifts that we bring to each other, especially when a life is ending. “From the moment we get that diagnosis,” Dr. Byock recounts, “all of a sudden, oh, my, has life changed… It throws in sharp contrast how important we are to one another, how much we care about one another. The connections between people are the things that matter most. If one were to ask somebody's who's being wheeled into transplant surgery, you know, heart or liver transplant surgery or someone who's facing chemotherapy for the third or fourth time, ‘What matters most?’ Trust me, the answers will always include the names of people they love. What's filling our Palm Pilots or our iPhone calendars starts to drop away really fast when someone we love is seriously ill.” Death, like birth, is a portal that throws open the doors of perception that invites us to see with utter clarity the sacredness that is in every human life. And there is no better way to honor this innate sacredness, this God dwelling inside every human being, than to express these four things as someone is dying, when the zone between life and death is a porous, thin place.
Jesus’ mother and aunt and friends stand at the foot of the cross and watch him die, and in doing so they give him the gift of community, that in these final moments he will not be alone, that he will die not only amongst those who revile him but also with those who love him and honor him. Jesus looks at his mother in his own way says to her, “Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.” And with that Mary’s heart, broken with grief, begins to heal as the beloved disciple holds her as a son might hold his dying mother. While the other men in the story continue to shout and cry and curse, continue to squabble about titles or gamble and engage in transaction over cloth, Jesus and his family and friends look into each other’s eyes for one last moment, and see God dwelling in each other. They spend these last moments saying good-bye to another, Good-Bye, which is, after all, another way of saying God be with you.
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