One look. Part I.

Last night the rooster crowed and the Lord looked at me.

That terrible sound rang into the night in my very act of betraying the one I loved most, and he looked at me. He stood on the threshold of his own nightmare, but he looked at me.

Even then, his thoughts were of me. His heart was full of me.

Perhaps my undoing came from knowing that. Here I stood, my filthy words still staining the air around me, my denial of him removing me as far from him as possible, and yet still he saw me.

And even as I denied him, my words proved true.

I do not know him.

I do not know the man who knelt and washed my feet.

I do not know him.

I do not know the man who took me onto a mountain and showed me the glory of God.

I do not know him.

I do not know the man who seized my sword and let them take him away.

I thought I knew him well. I thought he would raise us up and I would help him lead the way to freedom. To hope. To truth. I knew him as my Messiah and my Lord. I thought he was my everything.

I did not know him as my ransom.

Truth be told, I did not think I needed a ransom.

Truth be told, I did not know myself.

In that look he held up a mirror in which I saw myself true for the first time.

Angry.

Prideful.

Selfish.

Afraid.

I could have spoken up for him. I could have testified to all I have seen, shared about the man whose life changed mine forever. Who knows? Maybe they would even have released him if I had been persuasive enough. At the very least, I could have gone with him into death, as I had sworn to do. And now, here I stand, hands empty, utterly alone, and he goes to death with my last words of betrayal as a parting gift.

This is worse than death.

I do not know the man.

Those words sum up everything I am.

When he turned and looked at me, I knew.

His gaze held the knowledge of my suffering and his response of pure love. He saw into the truth of me and did not look away. I am doing this for you.

No. No. No.

Who could look at me like that in such a moment? My agony is not that he knew the moment I betrayed him. It is that he knew and still loved me so much.

Even as I turned from him, he turned to me. Even as my words created a canyon between us, his look of love bridged that gulf and reached me.

It is terrible to know that I never earned the love he gave me. It is terrible to know that I thought I could. The love that hangs there now, bleeding, broken, alone and dying, it is something I will never, ever comprehend. And I know now that through all those days of power and hope and miracles, he saw this moment. When I walked high in my heart thinking he had chosen me because I deserved it, he knew all along that I would be standing here watching him die alone for me because I was too full of pride and fear to own him, to go into death with him.

I never knew him at all. And now that I do, now that I see a glimpse of the man who is God, I see myself too. I see how little I have ever truly believed. And now I am dying a different kind of death, a death far worse than the one I imagined gloriously giving him in my love for him.

This is the death of my belief in myself. This is the realization that I am utterly lost. The same fear that put him on that cross is the fear that drives me. The same anger that drove the whips and the hammers surges in my heart.

I. Denied. Him.   

This darkness cannot hide me from myself. I am broken by my shame and by his look of love.

I never knew him.

And how will I ever know him now?