If you care for me, make a pact with blood
I know your eyes have seen us
Every war-torn face, every orphaned son
Has not escaped your notice
If you want to appease our mourning
Enter low into this morbid story
No frivolous act will comfort me
Immanuel, are you a God of Empathy?
If the Word never felt the grave
How could his voice have any weight? [1]
Did you speak to appease the crowds?
Voicing platitudes, maintaining your distance
Sing a eulogy for grief never felt
A cruel front to cover your indifference
I trod on the grapes but drank only water [2]
I hear those adages but we’re sheep led to the slaughter
I
Juxtapose
Your blank-faced icon
With our blood-filled groans
Arms outstretched yet cold and stoic
Don’t fabricate
Your incarnation here
I heard the exiled say that your voice took on flesh [3]
Radiant and glowing, but evidence is showing that appointed time was too good to be true [4]
Because you were always being chased but never seemed to be caught [5]
Slipping and running, docile but cunning you were a spectacle ephemeral and made to look like a man
We should have read the signs, viewed close enough translucent, lucid seeming but a sham to make us think you cared
And the twelve didn’t think it strange that after three years he still ran like a phantom, a ghost ascending into heaven [6]
Descending to your birth, the virgin felt no pain and no lament was heard when they cut your chord [7]
Nails struck through flesh but silence was ensuing alluding they slid through like rain through a cloud [8]
We'll run to the tomb, but never cling to the voice, the breath returns to the lungs that don't have a chest for us to lean on [9]
"O Kurios mou Kai o Theos mou," I long for a wound to touch in your side [10]
Rest above our suffering
Incapable of comforting
Misanthropic deity
Oh, paragon of apathy
You were never there,
You never cared,
Your appearing was just a ploy for saving face
[1] Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform, 38
[2] H.E.W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study of the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church, 156
[3] John 1:14
[4] Romans 5:6
[5] John 7:44; 8:59; 10:39
[6] Acts 1:9
[7] The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, ch. 13
[8] Acts 8:32
[9] John 13:23
[10] John 20:28
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