The most powerful way
to communicate truth is story.
By “power”
I mean explanatory power.
And by “story”
I mean a plot with beginning, middle and end
that contains similes and metaphors.
We could stop there
and just accept that explanation
of truth as truth
or we can explain further
that story gives truth meaning
like Aesop’s fables
and Lewis’s Narnian Chronicles
or better yet
think of Christ’s agrarian parables
that strum the soul
on a spiritual level
with a celestial harp of gold
and hands of clay that bleed when cracked.
The Word,
the Logos—
where truth and meaning
perfectly harmonize
(a story of hypostatic union dramatized
within the story of theistic union immortalized)—
produces colorful words on a fluid canvas carefully animated,
not spontaneously conflated
by creatures of clay that bleed
when flagellated
with tongue lashes that never leave,
being held to the same standard
created by religious Pharisees.
These hypocritical stories
that contain broken truth
and shameful meaning
are daily reconfigured
to repeat the same cycle
of sin and self-hatred,
which is why the body of Christ
was fated to be broken.
Broken I tell you, Broken!
Torn apart and sewn back together
to be put on display
on our timeline—
“forever and ever”—
for skeptics then and now to mock and jeer.
There’s only one thing
that keeps me up at night with fear—
the thing that obsesses me,
the thing that I hold most dear:
The story of the Crucifixion.
Didn’t He know what would happen to Him
when He planned His rescue mission?
Or was he just another masochist
or revolutionary on a long list
of mercenaries?
Then Dawn always arrives
just in time,
finding me half-dead, half-alive.
But the plot of the story doesn’t stop there—
what we call “falling action”
is God’s Resurrection.
Dawn is a symbol for the new Creation.
So why did God put Adam and Eve
in the Garden only to forbid them
to sample sumptuous fruit?
Perhaps I could answer that question
with another question:
Why did God lead His people out of Egypt
only to have them wander through the desert,
all-the-while, writing heretical poems
on the tablet of their hearts
with the theme of resentment
their pens
to impart?
The answer lies when we look through
the biblical lens …
of Trust.
No matter what anyone says,
trust is the essential lesson
the protagonist yearns to learn
in every story;
otherwise, human enzymes
would’ve devolved
to digest bugs and flies
and reptilian conspiracies that paralyze;
snakes instead of flesh-and-blood disciples
that enslave themselves
with kryptonite chains,
attached to golden idols;
snakes that adapt to living
in the scorching heat in the wilderness
without bread and water,
the Living Bread, the Living Water.
These metaphors,
embedded with explanatory power,
are alive, as alive as you and me
but eternal and wonderful
because we didn’t cause it,
or create it or sustain it.
The Great I AM thought it wise
to sacrifice His Son for those
who hated Him for loving them,
paying the ultimate price for their penalty
for failing to till the soil
to His earthly orchards …
and thus producing rotten fruit
that forsakes the Vine—
traders to their own tribe—
only to get a bitten apple
thrown back in His face.
And to that irony,
we accuse Him of being
an “Absentee Landlord”—
the epitome of divine disgrace.
But He made a way where there was no way
through the wilderness to Hollywood Blvd,
not to disregard
the flesh-and-blood of holiness
commanding us to partake
for our sake and the sake of the church—
the sacrament of Communion.
What’s more miraculous
than the “real presence” of God
indwelling bread and wine?
Perhaps I can answer that question
with another question:
What’s more beautiful than glorifying God who dwells within
and empowers us to break the chains
of habitual sinning,
enjoying Him forever
like a tall glass of cold water,
filled to the brim,
that never runs out
of saving truth and delicious meaning?