Christians place Crucifixes in positions of prominence in their homes and in their Churches. We often make the sign of the Cross. God placed the original Crucifix in the position of prominence on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. Jesus also received his bloody wounds on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. What does all of this tell us about the importance of what took place on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection?
Fear not! The script is already written. Our immutable God will not rewrite the script. God parted the Red Sea for the Jews. God will part the Red Sea of Death for us. Rejoice and be glad.
The God with the bloody wounds is as important to us as food and drink. Without food and drink, we die of hunger and thirst. Without the God with the bloody wounds, death is just as certain.
A beautiful, symbiotic dance of question and answer weaved its way through his bloody wounds to bind the Crucifixion and the Resurrection together into the conversation. Are you privy to the conversation?
His bloody wounds are the punctuation marks that our evil opened in his body. Before we knew what his answer would be to the evil that we did to him, his bloody wounds were question marks. After, they became exclamation points. There was a change in punctuation. The change in punctuation is the good knews of great joy - very good news for us.
The doctrine of the Real, but faceless, Presence of God is true - absolutely, entirely and positively. However, it is not true enough. It barely skims the surface of God. It hits the atmosphere of our understanding of God and bounces off. It is a tangent. It contributes little to our understanding of God.
The bloody wounds we opened in the body of Christ are windows that reveal the nature of God.
The current of salvation flows from godlessness to paradise through the bloody wounds we opened in the body of Christ. We can surf it to our salvation.
The payload of the thirty-three year Visit that the Son of God paid us at and about the city of Jerusalem in a region of our planet that we call the Middle East more than two thousand years ago was apocalypse. The Visit revealed to us the nature of God.