Reader.

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

I’ve been listening to a version of that song from Tommee Profitt’s new album

The Resurrection of the King.

https://open.spotify.com/track/68SvQp1992P62AUdgOSqLm?si=6ce93d44e50643da (also available on YouTube and Apple Music)

It’s an African American spiritual first printed in 1899, likely composed by enslaved African Americans in the 19th century. It later became the first spiritual included in a major American hymnal, and it is also the only African American song included in the Catholic Church’s Liturgy of the Hours.

​
As I listen to the words, it strikes me that we CAN name who WAS there.

Mary, His mother. The women who had followed Him. John. The soldiers. Each one standing in the same place, witnessing the same moment, but holding it from a completely different perspective.

I’ve been trying to imagine it, and I can’t get there. I can’t watch anything violent in a movie or show without it staying with me for days. I won’t sleep. I can’t imagine the crucifixion.

I find myself trying to imagine what it was like for those who loved Him to stand there and watch. To watch your son, your rabbi, your cousin, and to not be able to step in or stop what was happening, and still, to remain.

As I listen to that song this year, I find myself asking a new question. What did these women and John know that I haven’t grasped yet? Is my relationship with Him such that I would stay? That I wouldn’t turn away from His suffering, but remain near to Him in it, in the same way that He remains near to me in mine?

​If you want to sit with this more over the weekend, I invite you to The Women Around the Cross podcast.

It follows the perspective of the women who were there, at the cross, at the tomb, in the waiting, and what it may have been like to remain.

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

Maybe today, we don’t rush to answer. Maybe we just stay with the question. Not with shame or condemnation, but as an invitation for Jesus to reveal something about Himself that you haven’t had the opportunity to consider before.