Christology
What if he were all of these, this Jesus?
Come and come again and come again?
What if he were holy through the ages
Given and known to women and to men
By foreign names and strange, forgotten faces?
What if he were shepherd under guise,
The sleek and subtle mover of the worlds?
And moved among the worlds in our round world
In weird habiliments and forms unproud,
The gift and giver of the flaming word:
The gatherer and grower of the good,
To brood and barrow, fold and farrow,
Mead and meadow, fallow field and fen;
To cote and cradle, creed and fable
Giv’n and giv’n again and giv’n again?
– First published in Psaltery & Lyre, April 3, 2014. –
Jesus Among the Lepers
Well, sure, but he was Jesus, after all.
And then, leprosy
isn’t all that contagious
it’s just,
you know,
scary
and hideous,
taking parts of people,
wounding them
and warping.
Well, what if Jesus
went among the lepers
because
he was
one of them himself,
our Scandi Savior?
warble-warted and off-kilt?
that mane
matted with th’oils
unsacred of the sick?
those piercing eyes
tucked deep inside
loose ridge
of flesh inflamed?
that aquiline
made sudden as a Shakespeare clown’s?
as bulbous as a drunk’s or derelict’s? all
pustulous and bent? corrupt? unsettling
to the sight and given to bubble and to rasp
like brook and smeltery and den of asps?
that symmetry, that lantern jaw
bent jaunt and jutted aw?
What if he, a leper, had come among the clean
to rid us of disease unseen
through deep dis-ease? to sicken us of sin?
to manifest the rot and break and ruin
of our own and fearful hearts? to breathe
salvation in our mouths
like amaranth
and canker?
What if we took
Isaiah at his book
the way we take
his words and saw
no beauty there,
and felt no love?
saw in that gaze
no privilege but
accusation of our birth, and days?
Would we still seek his touch?
bow our irreverent heads?
accept his unclean kiss?
provide our feet to him for washing or,
more,
dare
to wash his withered and his wattled ones?
caress and clean
the wound
and warp of them?
take his part, perilous?
or fear
to know
what’s just,
in all our cult contagious,
mere look, and leprous.
Well, sure. But we’re not Jesus, after all.
Jonathon Penny is a husband, a father, a dean, a sometime singer and songwriter, occasional fictionist, and poet. Wherever he finds himself, he tries to make what isn’t, build what’s needed, and improve what is.
