Chinook
by George Hosier II  - March 24, 2008

I Was There


Something awakens me, jerking me out of a sound sleep, I feel my heart pounding, and the back of my neck prickling. What time is it? I instinctively turn toward my alarm clock. The red digital numbers read 12:00 pm. PM! Doesn’t that mean noon? I shake my head to clear the grogginess from my brain. What is going on? What had awakened me? How could I have slept so long? Why is it still dark? I look toward the alarm clock again to verify that I had misread the time, but the familiar glowing display has vanished.

Now I become aware that I am standing. Where, I cannot tell. I shudder in the inky, supernatural blackness. Waving my hand in front of my face, I see nothing but this palpable darkness that presses against the back of my eyes and seems to seep into my nostrils and trickle down my throat, gagging me. Beneath my feet, the ground is convulsing and retching, like a poisoned animal struggling for its last breath. Around me I can hear things falling, rocks splitting, wind howling. Women are screaming in terror, and men cry out hoarsely. I am surprised to discover that they speak in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. I am even more surprised to realize that I can understand their words.

Suddenly, I recall what had awakened me. It had been a male voice, shouting. It both resonated with the authority of a king and wailed with a trillion agonies. It had been speaking two sentences in Aramaic: “It is finished!” “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

Without warning, a bolt of lightening spears through the darkness, trailing sizzling tendrils of spark. For a split second, my surroundings leap starkly into view before the darkness snaps back into place. As the thunder cracks and booms and rolls around me, the scene that I saw in that brief flash is seared onto my retinas like a vivid tableau.

I am standing at the crest of a hill. A dead man sags before me. His chin is resting on his chest, allowing me to see that his head seems to have been wrapped with a wreath of small branches thick with four-inch thorns. Iron spikes impale his hands to the horizontal beam of a rough timber. His feet are nailed onto a post, planted in the ground, which supports the horizontal beam. He has not been dead long, because fresh blue-red blood is still dripping from the thorn tips and trickling onto the grotesque mosaic of clotting, blackened gore and avulsed skin that mars the place where his beard had been. His arms and shoulders are deeply lacerated. Multiple linear wounds are visible on his torso. Rib bones glisten where flesh has been torn from deep gashes that clearly wrap around from a back that must be ripped to shreds.

To my left, a party of Roman Legionnaires who had been rolling knucklebones on a fine seamless robe has paused to cower in wide-eyed dread at the omen of mid-day darkness. To my right, a group of veiled women and one young man with arms around each other are sobbing in unabashed grief. Two other crosses display writhing victims, who for the moment go unnoticed by the Centurions and Pharisees and rubberneckers cringing beneath the wrath of the elements.

The air itself is so thick with evil that I can barely breathe. The smell of blood, perspiration, and body fluids nearly chokes me. Incongruously, when I do manage to inhale, I also notice the pungency of vinegar, mixed with the fruity aroma of red wine. All five of my senses are reeling in revulsion at what they are experiencing. My entire body begins to shake uncontrollably. As if in sympathy, the ground shudders again, and I hear things popping and creaking beneath my feet that are staggering to maintain my balance.

Another flash of lightening plunges the scene into stark relief. This time I notice that above the head of each victim is tacked a placard. The placards on the other two crosses proclaim the crimes for which these men are now surrendering their lives in such a cruel manner. However, I only read two words on the placard above the man before me. In shock, I read it twice before the scene is plunged again into darkness. I can still see those two words, floating, as it were, in the black void before my eyes: “George Hosier”! The words seem to blink tauntingly like a cheap neon sign. The realization hits me--this man is dying for me!

Who put him there? Is this a diabolical joke? I want nothing to do with this barbarism. Somebody get him down from there! If I’ve done something wrong, take it up with me. Take me to court. Let me face my accusers in a trial by a jury of my peers, but for God’s sake, stop doing this to this...this innocent man!

I hear my own voice shouting, now. “Who nailed this man to this cross? Who did it? I demand to know!” A blast of wind hurtles out of the darkness, catching my words and driving them back into my teeth.

I become aware that I am gripping something in each hand. Another lightning bolt! I lift my hands to see that my right hand wields a short-handled, heavy-headed hammer, and my left is clasping a fistful of spikes. I gasp to notice that my sleeves have been sprayed with blood splatter, and the bottom of the cuffs look as if they have been dragged through pooled blood. In revulsion I hurl the tools of execution as far away from me as I can.

“Nooooo!” I scream! The lightning begins to flash a staccato pulse. The hilltop crosses dissolve. Now, each time the lightning strobes, it reveals a new scene from my past... The time I stole a quarter from my mommy’s dresser to buy candy... The time I broke my brother’s bike and didn’t tell him... My adolescent experiment with cigarettes... The time I got in a fight at school... Cheating on tests... Sassing my mother... Defying my father... Looking at dirty pictures... Lying on my job application... Selling that ’81 Accord as being in good condition when I knew the transmission was about to go out... Calling in sick to work so I could go fishing... Inappropriate suggestive talk to a co-worker... Talking demeaningly about my wife... Unforgiveness... Pride... Bigotry... Greed… Selfishness... Lust... Laziness... Peevishness... As each image flashes before me, it is punctuated by the sodden thud of a hammer, driving an iron spike deep between tendon and bone.

I crumble to my knees, sobbing in shame and remorse. My self-righteousness indignation at the atrocity committed against this man has been replaced by a sense of profound guilt. I was the perpetrator! “God! What have I done? I didn’t know!”

I don’t understand how I am responsible for him being there like that, but I do recognize my own depravity. I had always considered myself to be a pretty good guy--a basically moral person. “Nobody’s perfect”, I had reasoned, “but I’m certainly no Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer or Osama Bin Laden.” Now that mindset has fled. I cannot shake the conviction that I deserve to be the one hanging on that cross. My offenses against my fellow man, which I had considered so trivial, loom menacingly in my mind’s eye, brandishing the scales of impartial justice. In the courtroom of the universe, I now realize that I am condemned. I had committed the crime, but this crucified man served my sentence.

As I wallow, prostrate with grief and mortification, I hear myself begging for forgiveness. I am startled as, in the darkness, I hear a voice joining mine. It is the same voice that had awakened me. It is the voice of the man on the cross. In the same resonant Aramaic vernacular I hear his words clearly between ragged breaths of agony: “Heavenly Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he does!”

Instantly the reply reverberates from everywhere. It thunders from far above my head. It permeates the air around me. It seems to geyser from deep within my soul:

“This is my beloved son with whom I am well-pleased. For when you were without strength, George, Jesus Christ canceled the handwriting of ordinances that was against you by nailing it to his cross. He who existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be jealously protected, but emptied himself, taking the likeness of men and becoming a servant to death by crucifixion. You see, I love you so much, George, that I gave my only begotten son, to keep you from perishing like you deserve. Just believe in Him and you can have everlasting life.”

I raise my hands in wonder as the tears flow down my cheeks unchecked. “I believe! Help my unbelief.” Something flows over me from head to toe. It feels like warm oil, or blood perhaps, but it smells of frankincense and myrrh. As it washes across my body, the shame and guilt and pain is caught in its flow and carried away. I feel fresh, rested, healed, clean, invigorated, and more contented I have ever felt before.

But there is also an element of sorrow. It is not a shame-haunted self-deprecating sorrow like I am accustomed to, but the sorrow of unbearable loss and unquenchable longing. I wish I had been given an opportunity to meet this Jesus—the God-man who died for me. I want to walk with him and talk with him and develop a relationship with him. I wish he were not dead. I can only hope that I can live a life that will be worthy of his noble sacrificial death. I will try to live a life worthy of him, but the world will be empty without him.

My hands are still uplifted. I am startled to feel another pair of hands grasping them, lifting me firmly but gently to my feet. In another lightning flash I catch a fleeting glimpse of the hands that are drawing me upward. They are thick-muscled, callused hands disfigured by nail scars. All goes dark again as I leave the ground, but the hands continue to draw me forward and upward until I feel solid ground beneath my feet again. Then the hands release me.

I am still in the dark, but the darkness does not seem as thick. I strain to distinguish my surroundings, as a faint rose-colored light begins to dilute the shroud of night. Brighter and brighter it grows until I find myself in an ornamental garden at the break of dawn. Just across the garden, past the blue hyacinth, pink dephiniums, and saffron crocuses rises a rock wall. Chisel marks indicate that its vertical surface has been hewn out of the side of the mountain. Framed by gnarled juniper and myrtle trees I see a huge stone disc, chained to the rock wall and secured by an official looking seal.

Four quaternions of Roman legionnaires deployed a spear’s length apart throughout the garden eye me suspiciously. Their centurion bawls an order and they briskly move into a defensive formation in front of the stone disc, pila extended warningly beyond the shield wall of their interlocked scuti. The centurion draws his gladius and orders me to leave the area immediately or suffer instant death.

Before I can comply, the area is scrambled by a powerful earthquake tremor. Cedars thrash like a serpent’s tail. The steel staple anchoring the chain that secures the stone disc is wrenched from the wall. Soldiers tumble like bowling pins. A blinding supernova erupts from behind the rock disc, as a glowing figure steps right through the stone as if it were made of fog. The guards begin shaking violently, weapons clattering from their lifeless fingers, just before their eyes roll back in their heads and their knees buckle. The well-groomed lawn reaches up to catch their unconscious bodies.

I, too, am frozen with a nameless terror as the spectral figure approaches me. Behind him I see two more figures materialize, glowing also, though not so brightly as he. They effortlessly roll the stone disc aside to reveal the tomb that it had been sealing. Inside, I can glimpse a disheveled funerary shroud draped haphazardly over the lip of the sarcophagus, like clothes that had been discarded in a great haste.

The approaching form reaches his hands toward me, and I recognize the nail-scars. That resonant baritone Aramaic voice speaks again, but this time with none of its agony and all of its majesty. “George Hosier, I am risen to be your guide and your strength.” In a delirium of joy I sob out, “My Lord and my God!” I dive for his nail-scarred feet, hoping to be able to wash them with my tears, but my hands encounter only the softness of my pillow, and far away I begin to hear the insistent clamor of my alarm clock. Groggily I open my eyes to the familiarity of my bedroom.

I had been sleeping, but it was not a dream.
 

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