huddering on the very brink of collapse, she trembled her way down that skull-shaped hill, her whole world in anguish. Nothing but horror registered on her pain-convulsed consciousness, because there was room for nothing else.

Cruelly she bit into her own flesh to stifle the moans born of her agony. Desperately she clamped her eyes closed in a vain endeavor to blot from memory's sight the things she'd so recently looked upon. Infidel hands had mauled her Son, her firstborn, her cherished babe of long ago. They'd crucified Him. Through intrigue and false witness His own people had exchanged her gentle Jesus for a condemned murderer. They'd surrendered Him to the cruelest death known to a cruel age.

It had shattered her world into a surrealistic nightmare. Even with eyes shut, sight had now become a kaleidoscope of splattered blood and flaying flesh. Even with ears stopped, sound was now the compounding echoes of a thudding hammer. Her only awareness was the consternation of unreality. And maternal love was transformed into total anguish.

There, at the foot of the hill of destiny, the mother of Jesus the betrayed met the mother of Judas the betrayer.

Both had just looked upon the bodies of their sons, who had both died violent deaths: Jesus on a cross on the top of Calvary's hill and Judas on a tree at its base, where his distraught mother had fought in vain to dispense the dogs snarling over his remains.

As those suffering mothers looked into each other's eyes, they saw the reflection of their own pain. In their agony they fell into each other's arms; and the floodgates of immense anguish burst asunder.

The above scenario is only make-believe, of course. We have no written testimony to supply the details. The mothers might even have accused each other:

"Had not your son betrayed my Son . . . ," etc.

But maybe--just maybe--their empathy lifted them beyond the politics and the plottings of the day into an embrace that, at least, offered them the comfort of understanding.

That thought, it seems to me, epitomizes the spirit of the Christian Easter, a spirit that draws a veil of shrouding mercy over our blunders and our failings, a spirit that on that dreadful day found expression in the words "Father forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

If Calvary means anything, it must be forgiveness. There, on that cross, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19).

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D. J. Silver, a retired pastor and former editor of the South Pacific Division's Adventist Media Center's Channel magazine, now lives in New South Wales, Australia. This article appeared in the April 8, 2004, edition of the Adventist Review.