Eyewitnesses to the crucifixion

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, April 18th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Holy Week is a time for reflection—a time for Christians to consider the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s also a time to ask how that reality shapes the way we live.

EICHER: Sometimes, a fresh perspective can deepen our understanding of the most important event in human history.

Today, we turn to a short book of meditations by author Gregory Athnos. He’s Professor Emeritus at North Park University in Chicago. He taught there for three decades as a conductor and lecturer in music history and literature. His choirs have performed all over the world.

BROWN: Athnos is author of several books, and this Good Friday, we’ll hear about his book Silent Voices: Meditations for Holy Week. One of those “silent” voices is Barabbas—a passage read here by actor John Gauger:

GAUGER: The disgrace of crucifixion I deserve are being transferred to the innocent carpenter’s son? He dies a murderer’s death while I, the murderer, go free? Who is this man? Why does he willingly take my place?

EICHER: WORLD’s Mary Reichard talked with Greg Athnos about the book. Here is part of her interview.

MARY REICHARD: Greg, Silent Voices takes on different points of view of people who were present on Resurrection Day. And you focus on these silent figures who speak very little or not at all through the Scriptures. What drew you to tell the passion through their eyes?

GREG ATHNOS: Well, we’ve lived with the story our entire life. We've grown up in the church, and so we know the main characters. We know who they were, what they did, what the reactions were. But what about those other figures that don't speak, but they're part of the story? What were they thinking? And so I thought, if I can figure out, if I can get myself inside their sandals and robes and see the events through their eyes, that might enlighten me more deeply about the story itself.

REICHARD: Mm, hmm. Now, one of the things that some people might have a concern about is that you are blending Scripture and tradition with your own imagination. So that might concern some people. How did you, Greg Athnos, approach this without losing Biblical grounding?

ATHNOS: It was a challenge. I know the story. It's part of my life, and I want to be true to the story as scripture tells it. But I also wanted to get in addition to the facts, something, the emotions of it, which you sometimes don't pick up from Scripture. Facts are there. Emotions are sometimes in the background. …So I wanted to put myself in a pre-resurrection state of mind and speculate what could be possible situations and responses to those situations of those people? I was constantly trying to be creative and imaginative, and yet every time I came up with an idea, I had to put it against the facts of Scripture. …Now, can I say for sure what they did and what they thought? No, I can't. But I wanted the reader to assume the same position. So if you were that person, what would you do? And if your response was different from mine? That's the whole point of the exercise.

REICHARD: Why do you think it's important that we do this exercise and put ourselves in the sandals and robes, as you say, of these silent people?

ATHNOS: You know, we're like a smooth stone skipping over the surface of a calm lake. That's about how deeply we know the story because we've known it our whole life, so we can just skim over the surface of it and leave the murky bottom sort of untouched. I felt if we could find ourselves more engaged with the terrible thought that this person we followed for three years was going to have to die, and this went against everything we knew about and everything we anticipated about Messiah, the disillusionment would be overwhelming. ..And if we could get down to the depths of the disillusionment, maybe we would more greatly respond to the heights of the resurrection that follow. So the more deeply we understand the dark side, the more profoundly we can understand the bright side.

REICHARD: Let’s take a moment and hear a longer excerpt reading from one of the silent voices, who is this first one?

ATHNOS: Let's see. I think the soldier at the tomb. What did he see? The Scripture doesn't tell us anything about what happened, except it was an earthquake and the stone was rolled away. So I said, well, what would the resurrection have actually felt like and looked like? And I had to put myself in the eyes and hearts of the guy standing at the tomb witnessing all of this.

REICHARD: All right, that’s the set up. Let’s have a listen:

JOHN GAUGER: "I was peering into a new dimension. Shall I embrace it or flee from it in terror like the others? I lay there alone, naked of all pretense, ignorant of fear, immune to trembling, held captive by a blind and dumb neutrality. I could not escape those crimson flames, nor could I embrace them. As a Roman, I did not believe in hell and there was no heaven, just life and the void called death. I was trapped, caught between mind and heart. My heart wanted what the living presence offered, but my mind doubted my need to want. My heart wanted what I saw of divinity, yet my mind felt reluctant to part with my humanity. The two forces, negative mind and positive heart, fought within me. As a Roman guard, I foolishly allowed the one I had always lived by to reign, that hellish force of mind, narrowing my choices, obliterating all hope. If I fled, I would die in Pilate's court for dereliction of duty. If I stayed, I would most certainly die in the all consuming light of that living presence. I was a dead man, regardless. I made my decisive and destructive choice: I ran. I ran for my life. I, one of the crack troops of Rome, fled in utter, unfettered, uncontrolled terror. I refused the crimson invitation. I chose my Scarlet sepulcher over his white as snow paradise."

ATHNOS: I saw that all that God had ever put together in creation, all the laws that he had put in place to keep things going, they all disintegrate….And so we say “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and we say it so casually, but what that really means is everything that we have done to a perfect creation has to be destroyed in the process, which means that the return to Eden is violent and totally uprooting. So I tried to picture that as best I could in the writing. But then bottom of the line was, well, this soldier saw it all! Did he believe? Well, Scripture says nothing about that. And so, well, why didn't he, from what he'd seen, certainly he should have believed. Why didn't he? And so that was a … I was shocked by that, by having created a picture of what the resurrection did, who would not say yes to it? …

BROWN: There’s a lot more from Mary’s conversation with Greg Athnos that we don’t have time for today…So later this afternoon we’ll post a short episode in our feed that features the rest of this interview and a few more dramatic readings from Jon Gauger. We pray that it will be a meaningful reflection for your Good Friday observances.

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