The Sixth Station

When she saw him fall, she tried to call out but could only whisper. Her throat was raw and her voice spent from earlier shouting his name against the mob. “Barabbas,” they had yelled in unison, drowning out her frantic pleas.

Then Simon called out to the guards. They pulled him from the crowd to help, and she tried to follow. The guards pushed her back, and she stumbled and fell, just as he had.

From the dirt, she remembered this was how she had first encountered him. She had been trying to reach through another crowd, crawling on the ground, intending only to touch his sandal or his cloak. Somehow, in all the jostling, the people pressing round him, he’d known her touch. He turned and looked directly at her, down in the dirt, her tunic stained and caked. She was embarrassed, ashamed to be in public, ashamed for him to see. She buried her head in her hands and wept. But he would not take his eyes off her. He knelt down and cupped her chin in his hand. She looked up and saw his face.

It was unlike any face she’d ever seen. It was ordinary and plain and unremarkable. And at the same time it was completely extraordinary, a most remarkable face. She couldn’t stop staring. Long after he’d gone, she would still see his face as if it were inches in front of her, looking back, deep into her soul.

As Simon shouldered some of the weight off of him, he turned toward her once again. The pain she saw was too much for her. Blood dripped into his eyes and off his chin; sweat and tears mixed with the dirt of the road, making his face into a gruesome mask. And still somehow, it was his face, that face that had stared back at her on the road to Capernaum. He reached out to help her up, but the guards lashed him and pushed him forward. The crowd cheered and urged him on with taunts and jeers.

She tore a piece from her new tunic, the first she’d had in years that was not stained with her own blood, and charged after the mob. She slipped under the guard’s arm as he tried to stop her and reached out to touch him once again. But this time, standing, face to face. She wanted him to see—see what she’d become because of him. Healed. Whole.

She took the unstained scrap torn from her dress and wiped the blood and dirt from his face, praying she could stop the pain for him as he had for her. As the guards pushed the procession onward, she held the bloodstained rag in her hands and wept, still seeing his face, inches in front of her.