Blood Thirst

Why do we want to punish each other? Husbands and wives, daughters and mothers, sons and fathers, coworkers, and even friends. We feel any slight and we give it back to them; we want them to experience pain and we rub their noses in it. No matter how big the hurt – or how petty and small.

Is it any wonder, then, that God had to do what He did? God became one of us so that he could take the punishment that we want to dole out, the lashes, the torture, the ridicule, the cruelty. God let us make Him low – let us kill him as he suffered in writhing pain – all to take away our guilt and usher in peace by showing us how much he loves us. God satisfies our thirst for blood, for vengeance, for mockery, for violent payback, by letting himself become our whipping boy – and all powerful God bends his human head to our mercilessness, feeling every moment, every tear, every blow of our pain. We killed the only perfect human being that ever existed – because that’s how far our desire to share misery will go.

            And then… and then this Beautiful One, whom we have beaten and spurned and murdered, rises up. He lets us make him low in our meanness, and then… the merciful then… he lets us rise up with him in his glory. Thus showing that true power is in love. He is razed by our thirst for punishment; and we are raised by his thirst for forgiveness.

Christina Chase