The priest’s eyes met mine as I knelt at the altar rail. “The Body of Christ,” he said, placing the wafer into my cupped hands. “Broken for you,” and it rent with a crack so loud I gasped. My eyes pricked with tears as I examined the fractured halves in my palm.
Broken. For me.
**
Washing his disciples’ feet, Christ became servant, but he humbled himself further: strung up like a criminal and executed in gross display of power and violence.
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.
“We have no king but Caesar!”
He did not open his mouth. See him there, bruised and beaten. A man of suffering, familiar with pain. We esteemed him not.
“Hail, king of the Jews!”
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Despised, rejected. Like one from whom God hides his face.
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
Darkness falls as Light smothers. The earth shakes, rocks split, the curtain rends in two, and it is finished.
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.
His body broken, that all might be made whole. His Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.
—
Suzannah Paul lives the life bucolic at a summer camp in Pennsylvania and writes freedom songs at The Smitten Word.
