The Day His Best Friend Died

Today is Good Friday, and I want to post something I wrote back in 2005....because I ran across it this week and the memory of it touched me. This was written after the church I attended showed the video presentation of the Gospel of John over a series of Sunday evenings. The production pulled only what the book of John says. All the dialogue and narration came straight from John. And you know – not every event is told the same way or in its entirety in each of the four gospels. Until watching the video, I’d never paid much attention to what any particular gospel did or did not say. And I’d never realized how much of my Bible knowledge is comprised of a mix of all four books. 

After we finished watching the crucifixion scene, a woman in the church piped up loudly, "Well THAT'S not how the crucifixion happened!" Her comment offended me...I wanted to ask if she was there...but I bit my lip. But as many offensive comments tend to do...I started thinking and digging through John to see for myself. And it is true that John tells the story with much less detail than the other gospel writers put in. 

It’s no secret that John and Jesus were close. Throughout the book, John refers to himself as “the disciple Jesus loved.” Anytime in any of the gospels, when you see Jesus taking what we have come to call “the inner circle,” on a little field trip apart from the rest of the disciples, John was in that group. John was the only disciple (I learned Sunday night in the discussion) who didn’t die some sort of horrific death. So I guess you could say that John and Jesus were best friends of sorts.

And on this day, John’s Best Friend died. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life who are dear to me. I’ve not lost my best friend – and I hope I never do. I hope I go first. Because I can’t imagine that pain. To lose from my life someone who has known me and loved me despite my quirks and flaws – I don’t want to know that kind of a void in my life.

But I do remember when my nephew died. That was the first time I lost someone close to my heart. I remember a lot of things about his death – from hearing others talk about it, from pictures, from journaling. But you know what I remember by heart? I remember that I couldn’t start crying when I heard that he was gone – and then I couldn’t stop. I remember that when I saw the nurse carrying his little body into my sister’s hospital room, she carried him like a football and I thought that was uncaring. I remember that he was heavy when I held him – and babies aren’t supposed to be heavy. I remember that he looked like a doll in his casket and some people thought he was a doll. I remember singing “Near to the Heart of God” in the funeral service. I remember the funeral director telling me to leave my mom alone at the cemetery because she was praying and I was trying to talk to her. That’s all I remember. The rest that I only know because others told me. I only remember what mattered to me on those days.

And I would imagine the same was true of John as he wrote of his Best Friend’s death. Why would he notice that Jesus restored the ear of Malchus after Peter sliced it off in a moment of impulse Jesus-defense? All he heard were Jesus’ words to Peter – “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” And in that moment, John knew this really was the end. His Friend was going to die.

Why would he retain that Simon of Cyrene was recruited to help Jesus carry the cross? All he could see was that his Best Friend, exhausted and beaten, had to carry his own cross for a bit – and that’s all he could replay in his mind.

And right before Jesus died, He said these words that only John records: “When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Dear woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” With that exchange, John took quite seriously his role as the caretaker of his Best Friend’s mother. And only he could understand what a treasure and responsibility that was, because only he would have known how much Jesus loved His mother.

John didn’t mention the crowd spitting on and mocking Jesus’ body as He hung on the cross. He didn’t tell about Jesus forgiving the thief who repented as he died. He skipped the telling of the earthquake, the curtain splitting in two, the graves opening, the storm, the darkness…none of that mattered to him. His world had become just two people – a broken mother weeping in his arms and a Best Friend gasping for His last breaths just steps away. Why would anything else matter to him? He had a new mother to comfort. He had grief beyond what any other man there could know. And later, as he wrote – the other things were not important. Other people could tell those parts of the story. He told what he remembered by heart.

It’s just a theory of course. I wasn’t there any more than the person who said it’s not how the crucifixion went. But it is how it went. In the mind of one man, these were the details that mattered. And though I don’t know exactly why he chose to omit some of the more dramatic parts that come to our minds when we think of this story – I can imagine it was because those things just were insignificant in light of his grief and responsibility. And it just makes sense to me. So that’s my theory. Maybe one day when I get to Heaven, I can ask John for myself.