Max, your dad’s awake.” I had been watching a movie on television. One of those thrillers that takes you from the here and now and transports you to the somewhere and sometime. My mother’s statement seemed to come from another world. The real world.
I turned toward my father. He was looking at me.
His head was all he could turn. Lou Gehrig’s disease had leeched his movement, taking from him everything but his faith . . . and his eyes.
It was his eyes that called me to walk over to his bedside. I had been home for almost two weeks, on special leave from Brazil, due to his worsening condition. He had slept most of the last few days, awakening only when my mother would bathe him or clean his sheets.
Next to his bed was a respirator—a metronome of mortality that pushed air into his lungs through a hole in his throat. The bones in his hand protruded like spokes in an umbrella. His fingers, once firm and strong, were curled and lifeless. I sat on the edge of his bed and ran my hands over his barreled rib cage. I put my hand on his forehead. It was hot . . . hot and damp. I stroked his hair.
“What is it, Dad?”
He wanted to say something. His eyes yearned. His eyes refused to release me. If I looked away for a moment, they followed me and were still looking when I looked back.
“What is it?”
I’d seen that expression before. I was seven years old, eight at the most. Standing on the edge of a diving board for the first time, wondering if I would survive the plunge. The board dipped under my seventy pounds. I looked behind me at the kids who were pestering me to hurry up and jump. I wondered what they would do if I asked them to move over so I could get down. Tar and feather me, I supposed.
So, caught between ridicule and a jump into certain death, I did the only thing I knew to do—I shivered.
Then I heard him, “It’s all right, son. Come on in.” I looked down. My father had dived in. He was treading water awaiting my jump. Even as I write, I can see his expression—tanned face, wet hair, broad smile, and bright eyes. His eyes were assuring and earnest. Had he not said a word, they would have conveyed the message. But he did speak. “Jump. It’s all right.”
So I jumped.
Twenty-three years later the tan was gone, the hair thin, and the face drawn. But the eyes hadn’t changed. They were bold. And their message hadn’t changed. I knew what he was saying. Somehow he knew I was afraid. Somehow he perceived I was shivering as I looked into the deep. And somehow, he, the dying, had the strength to comfort me, the living.
I placed my cheek in the hollow of his. My tears dripped on his hot face. I said softly what his throat wanted to, but couldn’t. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”
When I raised my head, his eyes were closed. I would never see them open again.
He left me with a final look. One last statement of the eyes. One farewell message from the captain before the boat would turn out to sea. One concluding assurance from a father to a son, “It’s all right.”
Perhaps it was a similar look that stirred the soul of the soldier during those six hours one Friday.
He was uneasy. He had been since noon.
It wasn’t the deaths that troubled him. The centurion was no stranger to finality. Over the years he’d grown callous to the screams of the crucified. He’d mastered the art of numbing his heart. But this crucifixion plagued him.
The day began as had a hundred others—dreadfully. It was bad enough to be in Judea, but it was hell to spend hot afternoons on a rocky hill supervising the death of pickpockets and rabblerousers. Half the crowd taunted, half cried. The soldiers griped. The priests bossed. It was a thankless job in a strange land. He was ready for the day to be over before it began.
He was curious at the attention given to the flatfooted peasant. He smiled as he read the sign that would go on the cross. The condemned looked like anything but a king. His face was lumpy and bruised. His back arched slightly and his eyes faced downward. “Some harmless hick,” mused the centurion. “What could he have done?”
Then Jesus raised his head. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t uneasy. His eyes were strangely calm as they stared from behind the bloody mask. He looked at those who knew him—moving deliberately from face to face as if he had a word for each.
For just a moment he looked at the centurion—for a second the Roman looked into the purest eyes he’d ever seen. He didn’t know what the look meant. But the look made him swallow and his stomach feel empty. As he watched the soldier grab the Nazarene and yank him to the ground, something told him this was not going to be a normal day.
As the hours wore on, the centurion found himself looking more and more at the one on the center cross. He didn’t know what to do with the Nazarene’s silence. He didn’t know what to do with his kindness.
But most of all, he was perplexed by the darkness. He didn’t know what to do with the black sky in midafternoon. No one could explain it . . . no one even tried. One minute the sun, the next the darkness. One minute the heat, the next a chilly breeze. Even the priests were silenced.
For a long while the centurion sat on a rock and stared at the three silhouetted figures. Their heads were limp, occasionally rolling from side to side. The jeering was silent . . . eerily silent. Those who had wept, now waited.
Suddenly the center head ceased to bob. It yanked itself erect. Its eyes opened in a flash of white. A roar sliced the silence. “It is finished.”1 It wasn’t a yell. It wasn’t a scream. It was a roar . . . a lion’s roar. From what world that roar came the centurion didn’t know, but he knew it wasn’t this one.
The centurion stood up from the rock and took a few paces toward the Nazarene. As he got closer, he could tell that Jesus was staring into the sky. There was something in his eyes that the soldier had to see. But after only a few steps, he fell. He stood and fell again. The ground was shaking, gently at first and now violently. He tried once more to walk and was able to take a few steps and then fall . . . at the foot of the cross.
He looked up into the face of this one near death. The King looked down at the crusty old centurion. Jesus’ hands were fastened; they couldn’t reach out. His feet were nailed to timber; they couldn’t walk toward him. His head was heavy with pain; he could scarcely move it. But his eyes . . . they were afire.
They were unquenchable. They were the eyes of God.
Perhaps that is what made the centurion say what he said. He saw the eyes of God. He saw the same eyes that had been seen by a near-naked adulteress in Jerusalem, a friendless divorcée in Samaria, and a four-day-dead Lazarus in a cemetery. The same eyes that didn’t close upon seeing man’s futility, didn’t turn away at man’s failure, and didn’t wince upon witnessing man’s death.
“It’s all right,” God’s eyes said. “I’ve seen the storms and it’s still all right.”
The centurion’s convictions began to flow together like rivers. “This was no carpenter,” he spoke under his breath. “This was no peasant. This was no normal man.”
He stood and looked around at the rocks that had fallen and the sky that had blackened. He turned and stared at the soldiers as they stared at Jesus with frozen faces. He turned and watched as the eyes of Jesus lifted and looked toward home. He listened as the parched lips parted and the swollen tongue spoke for the last time.
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”2
Had the centurion not said it, the soldiers would have. Had the centurion not said it, the rocks would have—as would have the angels, the stars, even the demons. But he did say it. It fell to a nameless foreigner to state what they all knew.
“Surely this man was the Son of God.”3
Six hours on one Friday. Six hours that jut up on the plain of human history like Mount Everest in a desert. Six hours that have been deciphered, dissected, and debated for two thousand years.
What do these six hours signify? They claim to be the door in time through which eternity entered man’s darkest caverns. They mark the moments that the Navigator descended into the deepest waters to leave anchor points for his followers.
What does that Friday mean?
For the life blackened with failure, that Friday means forgiveness.
For the heart scarred with futility, that Friday means purpose.
And for the soul looking into this side of the tunnel of death, that Friday means deliverance.
Six hours. One Friday.
What do you do with those six hours on that Friday?