He died

My reading was in Samuel today... on Good Friday, I read that he died. Samuel. A great prophet in times of kings and wars... a single sentence.

How insignificant it seemed... jarring almost. Especially on a day that is so focused on the death of our savior... And if you think about it, how absolutely positively silly it is to follow a savior that died?? Hung on a cross, mocked, beaten, humiliated, and more for merely being who he was. And yet, without his sacrifice we are nothing.

It's contradiction and injustice made real. Probably more real than most people can handle... I still can't wrap my head around it sometimes. Why did God bother to do that? And how can people feel so self-entitled to think that we deserve better when we are so injust? It would be justice if we were all burned away, but he didn't do that. He broke the cycle... broke our chains to hatred upon hatred, evil upon evil, wrong upon wrong... by loving more than we can take sometimes.

It makes things like Saul's injust pursuit of David seem like a minor thing. We burn forests, slaughter children, poison rivers and wells, "honor" kill, beat and torture... people have dignity? What kind of creature with dignity does that? People say society has advanced... how? We've just gotten better at finding new ways of perpetrating injustice. Sure, we can be proud of what little we've done, but you have to be pretty full of yourself to think we can stop it all. The world's as broken as Jesus was on that cross. I'm glad that he rose again, if he didn't there's no hope in this world for something better. It would be like trying to use a Band-Aid on a lethal gunshot wound.