Actual Jesus
He made it quite clear, really.
He imprinted it in our every cell, this longing to know.
It's the same longing that the serpent twisted
To lure Eve and Adam to try to stuff it in by mouth
Instead of simply walking by His side as the apple of His
eye,
Tuned to His voice
And trusting and treasuring
The familiar that was already perfection.
He wrote it all down for us, you know?
He laid it out in His word long before He came
And jammed His Godness into the same skin we're in:
That skin that makes everything we do so natural,
That nature that makes everything
All about what we can touch and see,
That nature that ignores the hunger
While insatiably feeding on the stuff that guts us.
And therein lies His immeasurable mercy:
This allowing Himself to be ferried,
Carried along in the same boat we're in,
The one where we're scared all the time
Of the storm He can still
With the word we so naturally forget to remember to read.
Have you heard?
He is here within our reach.
He gives bread in bites we can chew.
He still multiplies it in our own human hands
So we have something to feed the five thousand or the one.
He knows how we are formed.
He knows we're afraid of the storm.
He knows we are always starving and stuffing and longing to
know
And longing to be known.
The Actual Jesus is here in our midst,
As pure as the pages of the dusty leather book on the shelf,
As sincere as the one with the notes in the margins and the
cover falling off,
As real as the tender heart that breaks for the one whose tender
heart breaks,
As definite as any word in its own language can ever be.
He lets Himself live in the fumbling tumbling words
That spill like a mess out of the Spirit-filled skin we're
in,
Sometimes in the loudest of shouts disguised as the softest of
whispers.
He lets Himself live in the strong weakness of hands
That sometimes hesitate to touch and sometimes hold too
tightly.
He's startlingly familiar, this Actual Jesus
Whose only agenda is being
I Am.
–erinrmsocha 5-2-2020
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