About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” — which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — Matthew 27:46

Being in the middle of God’s will, climaxing his age old dream, and all the while being abandoned by God. For that is the irony of God’s plan. The climax of God’s saving work upon the earth is the Great Reversal. The healing one wounded and suffering. The sinless one becoming sin. The eternal life dying. The Father’s beloved abandoned.

In this climactic moment, the unthinkable occurs. Suspended above the earth like a hypodermic, Jesus becomes the anti-venom necessary to save creation. Woundedness, evil, death and abandonment are injected into the healing one, the sinless one, the eternal life, the Father’s beloved. And the poison courses through his body, racking him with a pain only he can bear. And when the toxin has taken its toll, it is injected back into the earth from which it came.

And the reaction is almost immediate. Creation shudders and retches under the introduction of this new element. Centuries of momentum seem to cascade back upon itself within the bowels of the world. Feverish, the world closes its eyes, blanketing the land in darkness. Unable to stomach God’s eternal life, death trembles and vomits, spewing forth the righteous dead from its gullet.

Earth spasms under the force of two powerful currents colliding into and mingling with each other.

And as suddenly as the convulsive violence began, it ends. Silhouetted against a darkened sky, the divine syringe has been spent, its healing elixir expulsed into creation’s soil. The fever breaks.

And there is silence….