The cave.

I walk through the pitch black of a space with no definition. I can’t see ahead, I’m squeezing through a tunnel, a narrow cavern of smooth stone on either side of me and I hold my breath, not knowing where I’m coming out. There’s this strange sense that I’m walking through time, through space. It’s weird, and I would stop, turn back, but there’s an invisible presence ahead of me, calling me forward, encouraging my steps every time I start waffling with hesitation. My hands are lifted out to the side, feeling the cool, unmoving rock that keeps me from turning aside, and my eyes are opened wide, straining to see but not seeing anything at all.

“Where are we going?” I ask the slight breeze of someone I can feel ahead of me but can’t see. I think it’s Spirit, but I’m not sure.

There are no words, no actual conversation that floats back to answer my stuttered, half scared question, but I feel this presence respond inside my heart; an urgency, a whisper of teasing, a hand tugging forward. He’s waiting. I hear inside my own thoughts. Hurry.

I’m confused, impatient with this not knowing, and unsure where my brain is going to lead me. My exercises in trying to listen for Jesus don’t normally go like this – the stories I build in my imagination of the old written tales are easy to see, and I can’t imagine right now where this strange experience is headed and if I’m going to be able to make sense out of not being able to see anything. Maybe my brain is just having a meltdown and I’ll find myself nowhere.

But I lift my foot anyway, putting it in front of me, walking into the dark with all the speed of a turtle, feeling my way along this tunnel like a blind mole, unable to turn away from the tugging. My heart starts speeding up. My breath comes faster. I feel this nervous anticipation building. Something is ahead of me, something important. All of a sudden I am around a corner, blinking my eyes in a dim space, trying to get my bearings. I’ve stumbled right into a small cave, and there, sitting on a rough hewn bench on the far wall is him.

All of a sudden I know where I am, and when I am, and my heart thunders in my chest to be here of all places. It’s dead quiet, the sound of my breath muffled. There’s no normal sounds of a bird or a branch moving in the wind to ease the startled sense of being somewhere… thin, somewhere sacred, a space between worlds.

I’m in his tomb.

I don’t say anything at all, I just stare at him in silence, my eyes gobbling up his lean figure in the dim light… a light coming from… him, I realize. I seek out the holes in his hands that I heard about, the ones in his feet. My throat is so tight I can scarcely swallow. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be here – I don’t feel like I should move forward – what can I possibly say to him after everything that’s happened to him in this past week?

I stumbled into a place I never thought to come. It’s so intimate, such a powerful moment in time that I am frozen like a marble statue with the fear of wrecking it. What can I say to him after my own past week – the one filled with doubt over his existence, the week of railing at him for not being more visible, more easy to find and hold onto. The worry that there is no such thing as truth at all.

He doesn’t say anything at first, he just sits there, in silence, his body as still as mine, staring at me. But I realize, as my panicked brain starts working, that he’s gobbling up the sight of me as much as I’ve been doing to him. There’s something in his eyes, some kind of quiet relief, some kind of peace and calm as his body relaxes, his shoulders lower – my breath catches as the words pop into my mind, a little forbidden thought – it’s almost like… he’s been waiting for the sight of me.

I can tell just by being six feet away from him that he’s been through more suffering than I can even imagine. It exudes from him, the memory of an intense physical and mental trauma. I’ve heard the stories of his death for so long that they hardly mean anything anymore – in one ear and out the other for the past 30 years, the drone of an Easter sermon about sin and shame and us awful humans.

But, now. Now.

Now I’m standing in this little, rough hewn tomb with no Egyptian treasures, no recognition left by those who buried him of who he was. I want to do something to comfort him. But I don’t feel qualified. I don’t feel big enough. Where’s Mary? Where’s John? I feel the sting of tears at the back of my eyes, threatening to spill out as I look at him and see it in his frame, feel it in his quiet. The enormity of his suffering. The loneliness of his last moments. How much weight he carried on his own shoulders as most of those he loved ran and hid. How hard it was, and is still, for any one of us to truly see him for who he is.

“Hope you don’t mind,” He says finally, his voice raw, unused to speaking after three days, his words quiet, serious, lacking his usual teasing tone. “I wanted to see you.”

The words, quiet though they are, slam into my heart with an almost unbearable clutch of love. I feel my throat clamp all the way down and tears finally spill out, down my cheeks. An old verse cascades through my mind – his voice inside me now, where it can reach my heart in a second, in a blink: For the joy – he endured it all for the joy set before him… the words settle in my fingers and toes and crackle through my brain like lightening. What… or who is that joy? He doesn’t ask it out loud, but his eyes do as they hold onto mine. I struggle with the answer. It’s hard to let in. But he won’t let me hide from it – he lets me see it there, in those dark brown irises of his; the relief he feels that I’m here with him. The satisfaction that he’s removed all and any of my barriers to him. The ones I keep putting up that stem from shame or fear or doubt.

It exudes from him – this calm; this certainty. He’s moved the two of us beyond physical things and carried me into his home, his space of Spirit and eternity and soul. And the joy in his gaze, the quiet, intense joy as he watches me… as he waits for me to catch up with him. I am his joy. It trickles into my heart, building into a crashing wave of response from me to him, bouncing from one side to the other of my whole being with another almost painful wrench of longing and love and joy.

He couldn’t wait, he had to bring me here to him now, in this moment when he’s finished what he set out to do. He’s reminding himself with the sight of me of why he endured all that he did.

So he could have me. So I could have him.

So he could have you, and you could have him (if, and when, you want.)

“fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” -NASB Heb 12:2