When God Was the First to Bleed

Recently I’ve been caught up in thinking about Christ as sacrifice and blood language and how it’s been used. And I don’t want to get rid of language but get to the core of it. I’ve recently decided that Christ is sacrifice from God to humanity in praise of humanity’s original blessing (in my own working of things out I have a chapter in my head called “The Original Sin of the Church—Original Sin”). I’m in conversations with others and researching and studying but as I had to stop for the day I wrote a poem to get some thoughts out of my head. I’d love to know what you think.

When God Was the First to Bleed

It wasn’t the fruit, not really— but what it uncovered. Not the bite, but the knowing. The shiver of shame in sunlight.

And when the fig leaves failed, we sewed silence into our skin and called it religion.

But God, God stitched skin into garments, threaded grace through tendon and fur, and laid the lamb’s body down not in demand, but in mercy.

The first sacrifice was not to satisfy wrath but to soften our fear.

And every altar since was echo or shadow, each flame a flicker of the first covering.

Until one day Love walked uncloaked into our hiding, called our name through thorn and hush, and said, “Let it be my body now. Let it be my blood. If this is what it takes to tell you that you are still good.”

And maybe that’s it: not wrath appeased, but wonder restored. Not a price demanded, but praise offered— to the image still smoldering beneath the ash, to the likeness we lost track of in all our trying to be gods.

Christ, the sacrifice of God not for guilt, but in grief, and in honor— a holy hallelujah to what we almost forgot we are.