Christ On The Cross Is About Something Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

Christ on His cross is about something
apparently not so good before
that everyone around here now seems to suspect
once to be, and how it all must be better now,
or is on it's way to sort of be, inevitably...

But me? I wonder. Why
did it have to happen, to get done?
If God is God, and He lost
His only begotten son,
couldn't He
just make Himself another one?

He's God. Right? Or am I wrong?
Why the whole process? Why the story?
Why the drama?

Instead of the long suffering to such a miserable
humiliation in death and then there had to be
three more long days,
Could there not just be... a gray box on a screen...
"You are about to cancel the sins of the world.
Are you sure you want to continue? " and then...

"Okay" or "Cancel"
He hits "Okay". And Okay! And now what's for lunch?

We are forced to think that the very extent
of the content in the story is
of a unique and obviously greater value
than the way its action's results all wind up.

Some like to look so hard at that one thing,
or else turn the face away to something else.
But there is something more behind it,
and there's something more to come.

It is... all of it about something that is
the ground floor of everywhere we look
and everything we see. God could have
done it anyway. But He chose for His own
reason to do it like that.

In the entirety of fiction and as a matter
of fact, there is no worse ending story.
Adolph Hitler died by his personal choice
by means of a gun in his hand,
and every single other major world
religion starter drifted off in peace.

No greater man... no greater mission ever
leading so high... out of any fallen world
ended so low... such physical pain... such
humiliation... such loneliness. 'Why hast thou
forsaken me? ' I don't so much wonder
that he felt this. I wonder why did he
ever let himself cry it out loud?

It wasn't a posture to take to manipulate...
'Hey Father in heaven! Are you happy now? '
And who in this world heard it? His blessed mother.
She was sitting right there. And two canonized
gospel writers reported it to you and I.

Could the glory of faith in this world not
be in any victory we see, but rather in
the worst failure that could ever be.

Failure is the victory that is fought for
by no competitor, the change that
is planned for in no strategy, the out come
that is sought for by no effort, the sacrament
conferred by no priesthood, the lesson not
learned nor taught in any curriculum,
the experience that is savored in no memory
and most uniquely...

failure is the only event experience
utterly uncontrollable, unplannable
and un-initiate-able through any human
resource... God's eyes on us... nose and lips
pressed to the glass to see what's next.
It's all about something. Can you see?