Joy Sounds Like a Risen King

If you’ve ever wondered
What the big deal is,

Imagine for a second
Being dead
Not for a second
Or for a minute
Or for a week
Or for a year
Imagine death
As normative
Your daily rhythm
You are the zombie
The demon
The undead heathen that plagued your childhood dreams
You are the monster beneath your own bed
The reason children scream
You are the financier of sex trafficking
The one who ignores their friends in their time of need
You are the one who overeats
While Guilherme sleeps on a fraction of a day’s rations
’Cause the rest will need to last him
Until week’s end.

Imagine for a sec
That to be born dead
Was to be human
How foolish, then,
It would be to think
That you could make amends
And feel your way up the stairs of Heaven
To the throne room of a God so bright
And full of life
That His sheer presence
Would blot out every speck
That stained the light
Or approached without respect
Or fashioned its mind to believe
That even a century of good deeds
Would make a dead thing
Any less dead.

Can you imagine for a second
Trying your best
To be anything other than
Broken
For more than a second
For more than a minute
For more than a day?
To be human
Is to accept said brokenness
As a way of life
A reality to work around
A law more reliable than gravity.

A travesty
Is the walking dead
Suffocating itself to breathe its first breath
And calling it a life well spent
As if
Restlessness
And anger
And a global economy in debt with its own self
And three-year-old girls with cancer
Is anything less
Than a world that has been desperate for its Father
Since the day whispers in Eden
Turned Eve inward—
Away from the face of her reason for being—
Into treason.
(Even Eden’s leaves couldn’t cover the grief bleeding through the seams
Of the first Adam’s excuses.
Once the object of his poetry
Now the scapegoat for his blame—
The mother of humanity abandoned to face her fate
By her dust of a man.)

Can you imagine
Having
Everything
(The whole world, in fact)—
Every drip of sea
Every inch of land
Every creature under your authority and
Every fruit, every leaf, every branch,
Every tree except one?
How much lust is enough
To corrupt a garden planet
Planted in love?
Can you imagine
The amount of audacity you need for you,
A created thing,
To reach for a seat equal to your King
Like He didn’t sow you together
Piece by piece from Nothing
Or exhale into you the oxygen molecules
You breathe for free?

Have you imagined?
Have you remembered?
Have you looked in the mirror?
Do you have a clear picture?

If you were the King,
How would you respond?
Surely, not with new garments to keep the rebels warm
Or with a promise to wage war
—On the snake who preyed on our innocence for sport—
By planting in a virgin’s womb
A seed that would be conceived by the Spirit of the Lord
And become a Son who would come
From a lineage of liars and whores
And foreigners and anointed shepherd boys
To bring us joy
And heal our sick
And make the lame walk
And keep us lit
With water turned wine
And keep us alive
In storms turned calm
And show us the Way
While putting pompous, hypocritical religious elders in their place
And teaching us how to pray
And eating with sinners
And bringing little girls back from the dead
And showing us the cost of love
With sweat like blood
And submission to a cross
To forgive the rebels that spit on His face and mocked
To give life back to the dust
In a way the serpent could never again touch
Once the third day came and
The Messiah walked out of His own grave
Like He had just left Death headless
And cut off the Accuser’s tongue.

Can you imagine
What it feels like
To stare into the eyes of your own brokenness
And know, deep down,
You’ve already won?
Heaven ain’t a guess, game, or goal for the elect
Who know to whom they belong
Who enter the throne room of the Maker of Heaven and Earth
In a cubicle, closet, or car
And trade in their stress and trauma for a new song
By faith in a single man’s name
Because that man turned out to be God.

Have you imagined?
Do you have a clear picture?

If you’ve ever wondered
What the big deal is
About Easter,

Check His empty tomb
The stories are true.
The King is risen
And His name
is Jesus.

Cover Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash