Meeting the Jellybean Christ

There are No Bad Eggs

I sat on a metal folding chair, the backs of my knees sweaty in the Yuma, Arizona heat. I must have been wearing the dress Grammie bought, with white gloves that only fit my good hand and a silly white hat on my pixie-cut hair. I held my hand over my eyes as the film projector clattered in the church Sunday School room. I couldn’t watch such a gut-wrenching scene.

On the screen, they were jamming a thorny crown on him, mocking and spitting. Then they ordered him to shoulder heavy wooden beams and walk toward the Skull.

I thought I might faint.

Kids around me giggled and sneaked jellybeans into their mouths. The boy beside me kept making armpit fart sounds. The room was stifling and I could hear others squirming in their chairs, as if to say, when’s it over? I didn’t blame them, but nothing could tear my attention from the drama unfolding in the film.

I couldn’t bear to look at what those Roman guys were doing. And I couldn’t look away. As I recall it, the movie was one of those where a handsome, blond, blue-eyed Jesus acted out what our teacher called passion.

I’ll admit that I was a bit confused. Wasn’t passion what two people in love had? How was poor Jesus, getting nails driven through his hands and feet, having passion? How was that any kind of love at all?

Back then, I wondered what was good about Friday and why the day before Easter wasn’t called Terrible Saturday. Being a nice white Methodist kid, I marveled at all the great stuff my Mexican Catholic playmates had in their churches: cool statues and lots of gold stuff, with their ministers dressed up in satin robes.

My church was brown inside and out, with a simple pulpit and one forlorn spinet piano that my mother played on Sundays. No stained glass or statues of any kind—just one giant cross on the wall and those lovely metal folding chairs. I longed to be a part of the mystery of my Catholic friends’ worship, but my dad forbade it.

As I sat watching the film, I wondered if the Catholic church’s Easter story might be more beautiful. But a moment later, blue-eyed Jesus looked out from his cross and I started to cry. The moment felt a lot like when I’d brought home an injured kitten and Mom said no, we couldn’t keep it. And I realized that something so awful was more gray than colored.

As the film ended, somebody dropped a black jellybean that came to rest against my shoe. Maybe Jesus was kind of like that too. He got hung up to dry and no one tried to help him—the one jellybean no one ever wants gets chucked onto the floor.

Nobody tried to pick up that licorice bean, either. No doubt lint and dust bunnies and desert dirt already clung to it. A cheer went up as the lights came on, everybody jumping out of the chairs at once. The teacher herded us into a line to march out single file, and soon I was home again, drooling over my basket of goodies and hunting for the eggs my sister and I had dyed.

In my father’s faux-tropical garden, my sister found one that had been dipped into too many colors, turning it a muddy brown. The hardboiled symbol had a cracked shell, and bits of dirt and grass stuck to the wound. Mom told her to toss it back down—it wasn’t safe. Sis did and went back to chewing the ears off her chocolate bunny.

When Mom was busy, I picked up the ugly egg, its white dyed the color of brackish water, crowned with the grass and dirt. My heart ached for that black jellybean and I wished I’d kept it. But I wouldn’t let the desert sun spoil the rejected egg.

I was just a kid who’d been taught to believe in Jesus. And in Sunday School, we watched a movie that took a lot of liberties with the story. But as Jesus looked out from his death tree, I understood one thing: That those in trouble need love and help more than anything—and wouldn’t you know it, Jesus wants us to do just that.

Today is the awful Saturday we hate to experience. It hurts. Makes our shortcomings burn within us. The world is full of those who are in the clutches of evil through no fault of their own. May this Terrible Saturday awaken Jesus’ pleas for compassion, for lovingkindness, for mercy. May we act with such compassion that even a child can recognize pure love when she sees it.

That funky Easter, I took the bruised egg to the bathroom sink and rinsed away the grime. Suddenly it seemed beautiful, and I understood how passion really is about love.