Passing beneath Christ’s outstretched arm. (Part 4)

Passing beneath Christ’s outstretched arm

Part 4: It is reality

And the blood? How are we to make sense of this? It does not matter that Jesus was just one man, living in one place, at one time. He is a universal person because he embraces and embodies all that is human and all that is divine. Although his blood in my soul is just a metaphor, it was real blood that fell, and my soul is truly the very heart of me. By faith, by love – I mean his love so much more than my own – I am included, we are included, in what he did, for us. Whatever else is in my soul – and there is much good alongside with much that I wish was not there – it is the drop of Christ’s blood that transforms the whole. Some say that the soul is given by God as a part of the divine within us, but I fear this is too optimistic. Looking at humanity, I would say that the soul is a receptacle capable of holding the divine, but not in itself divine. It needs a drop of the divine to fall into our souls and activate its potential. There are too many barriers between us and God – a gulf growing bigger with each move of mine that separates me from him. But the drop of blood in my soul becomes the magnet that draws me back to him. A gravitational critical mass has taken residence at the centre of my being and, with the inevitability of the laws of the universe, it will overcome all resistance and land me gently in his presence. I am a marked man. We all are, all who have passed beneath his outstretched arm. God knows us all, and he loves us all, and only he can say what he will do with those who laughed in his face rather than bending before him and passing beneath his arm – though I am hopeful, because he is hope. But what I can say, is that we who receive his blood into our souls have been changed. It is clearly beyond me; I am grasping, floundering to explain how, but I know that I am changed, and that everything is potentially changed because he has been lifted up, and shedding his blood – for us, for me, for you. God loves us all, but to those of us who have received a drop of his blood into our souls, God says, “I know you. You are one of mine”. And I know in the modern age some people hate this sort of talk, but truth is truth, and in God we find ultimate truth.