In
a very real sense, as Christ shouldered the Cross and suffered upon it, He
used the Cross to open the way to our salvation, like a door. This
poem imagines the wood of the cross being made into a door, something on
which one may meditate. As a carpenter's son
— albeit the son of
Joseph who took care of Him as a father —
it seems an appropriate and fitting thought. Woven in is some Biblical
history, when the Israelites smeared blood on the lintel and escaped
death. —JR
The Door of the Cross
Upon
the cross they hung Him from,
And fixed Him there, to succumb,
They pounded nails to hold Him fast,
His limbs outstretched, while His agony last.
There
He hung, His hands unfree,
In pain for us, upon that tree...
Thus
suffered Jesus the Christ,
Who upon the wood was sacrificed;
The carpenter's son of time afore,
From its wood
He now made a door.
―The portal of salvation,
And open to every nation!
The
door of holy Grace,
An
entry to the
holy place!
The horizontal limbs, like
a lintel o'er,
And the vertical holding His torso before:
To the stipes upright, his legs were nailed:
Les jambe in French, were there impaled.
Imagine
how they suspended Him,
Like a carcass h anging
from trunk and limb;
And imagine the standing timber, now cleft,
To make doorposts, both right and left.:
It
harkens back to Testament Old
When blood was sprinkled on lintel of yore,
Stay inside the Israelites were told:
Till morning come, leave not before.
The angel of death would pass them by
And leave untouched the Hebrew first born;
But Egypt's
born, these
first would die --
And for their children,
would
Egypt mourn.
The Blood on the lintel of the Cross of Christ,
Was spilt when He was sacrificed!
His Blood there left is
a sign on the
Cross,
Of a
pass
over to
eternal life!
—John Riedell
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