does this end too cynically?
...
“We were free and made alive the day that True Love died”
-True Love, Phil Wickham
Love is dead
Or truth in love is so
And true love is a mockery
A hypocrisy of deepest kind
Claiming its own very opposite
But Love is not dead
In truth, Love died
Over two millennia ago
True Love died the truest and brutalest death
For being love
And claiming as much
Three nails pierced Love’s flesh
Hammered in by hate
And dropped splashes of the crimson red
Now claimed as the colour of love
True Love died and was dead
But three days later arose
Dead so others might love again
But Love was not recognized before His death
And less so after,
Even while still on earth
And people presume to recognize love today?
The greatest tragedy of love
Lies not in Love Himself
But in the bitter twisting and misrecognition
And blasphemy of claiming love today.
i never really understood why Jesus was compared to a sheep before a shearer. for a little while i thought i did, but then i read a fable about pigs and sheep. a butcher was coming to take a pig away from the farm, and the sheep asked the pig why he was squealing so. the sheep said they were often carried off by strange men and then were later brought back slightly colder, but no worse for the wear. they never made any sort of complaints. the pig responded, he doesn't want your meat, but from me he wants my bacon! from then on, i thought of sheep before shearers as whatever, because they didn't die. maybe the sheep don't know that, but we do, so why bother trying to compare them?but i realized something. Jesus was before shearers. they were stripping him of something, but it wasn't really His life. He was killed, He was dead, but not forever. He came back to life. He wasn't taken by butchers, He was taken by shearers who stripped Him of His life for a little while, but not for long.as a sheep before the shearers is silent, so He was. right down to the shearing.
it is written "God is love." it's been written "love made history" (history, matthew west). "true love died" (true love, phil wickham) and therefore made it. before love, there was no history, there was no was. evryhting is its own eternal consequences; no forgiveness, no forgetfulness. no past, we are in sin. the great deaths make history, but the greatest death made it. history. the cross was the way to forgiveness, when we no longer live in the sin we have committed. it's now in the past, buried, forgotten. i still sin, but after i do it's gone and over if i am forgiven. love made forgiveness. love made past. love made history.
