Christ the Lord, the Savior, the Sacrifice

He trod the winepress—the curses of the Law, the judgments of God—and from it poured a river of foam bloodier than Pharaoh’s nile, than deuteronomic plagues.

And all that river he drank. From that cup—from the rim to its dregs as potent as any poison: all poisons, all violence. So acrid it seeped out his pores in drops of red—this Being who forged himself in flesh, that had from heaven, caged himself in ribs and shackled himself to the bones of a human form was Life sentenced to death without reprieve.

And there in the wilderness that the children of men had made of paradise he waited. Thirty years till on the horizon a streak of smoke. The caw of black birds and jostle of vultures. War and plague and pestilence came: The Enemy, the ever famished, the hollow one never filled.

Heaven, where all that was not praise was worship, went silent. As the son of God/Man let himself be swallowed whole. Let his grave be dug sixfeet deep and wide enough for a carpenter with broad shoulders.

But there, at the heart of death—where the bones of men lay broken, where the hair of women hang grey and lank in dusty silence—He the Vessel Broken, He the Punisher and Punished, poured out all the stored up wrath of God in a tide so fierce universes on their axis shuddered.

All that Death would die.

And with his Victor’s smile began time’s unmaking. And with his wisdom made heaven and earth new again.

--David