She holds out her hands to receive the bread and juice. As I bend down with the cup, I see a small semicolon tattooed on her wrist. Without asking, I know part of her story. My breath catches in my throat as I say what I’ve said to the forty other people who have come before her.
“The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”
I try to put extra meaning into my words. I hover near her for a second longer before moving to the next person. For you. Specifically. For you. You are so valued and loved that Jesus was thinking about exactly you, as you are today, when he died. He believed you were beyond worth it.
Does she know? Does she believe it?
In that moment, I realize that I get Jesus. Finally.
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I’ve always had a great relationship with God. God was available for me to talk to, ask things from, and joke with. I’ve felt God close to me every day of my life for as long as I can remember. When people asked me about my religious preferences, I always said, “God and I are good.” Because we always were. I never questioned or doubted my relationship with my Creator. It’s rock-solid, loving, and joyful.
Jesus? Not so much.
I grew up in a Methodist Church that preached the Gospels, so I knew a lot about Jesus. But I never got the hype. For me, Jesus was a dude who wandered around and told stories and occasionally pissed people off. He was supposed to be this perfect, supremely loving human, but the dryness of Bible left me feeling like he was a bit of a snooze. I had a hard time connecting to the loving parts of Jesus when he mostly seemed to stand around and lecture people.
I also struggled with his relationship to the Trinity. If God was the almighty, Jesus seemed a little bit like an add-on, a human dude who showed up all, “Hey, I’m here, too!” And I was always bothered by the idea of an intercessor in my relationship with God. My Sunday School teachers told me I was supposed to pray to Jesus, who would speak to God on my behalf. But because of my intuitive connection to God, this practice felt like a frustrating, cosmic game of Telephone. I wanted to talk to my friend God directly. I resented Jesus standing between us, like a Divine Receptionist: “I’m sorry, did you have an appointment to speak with the Creator?”
And frankly (note: this is the part I’m afraid I’ll be stoned for), I always thought Jesus was kind of a jerk. Translations of his conversations haven’t been kind. For example, he says to the woman at the well, “Woman, give me some water.” Um, would it hurt you to throw a “please” in there, Son of Man? And let’s not get started on the passage where he calls a woman a “dog,” which would have been a racial slur in that time. Or the eye-rolling way he asks, “How long do I have to be with you?” when his disciples don’t immediately understand the point of his meandering parables. For a supremely loving Messiah, he didn’t exactly give me the warm-fuzzies.
And so, after I left the church at 18, I had little use for Jesus. I was so happy to have permission to talk directly to God again. And I did. Just like when I was a child, I laughed, cried, questioned, pondered, and chatted with the Divine. It was, and always has been, the sweetest, easiest relationship of my life.
When I returned to church at age 34, I knew I’d have to make peace with Jesus somehow, because I would be hearing about him a lot. And so, when I bought the first Bible I’d owned since high school, I started with the Gospels. I needed to understand this guy who had supposedly died both for me and for the God I loved so much.
I’ll be honest: It took a while. The first thing I noticed was the intense, authentic devotion he inspired in the people who followed him around. Especially in women. As I learned more about the historical context of Jesus’ ministry, I realized what I had read as casual dinner chats with whoever invited him into their homes were actually radical statements about an oppressive socio-political structure. And I learned how some symbols in his stories would have been perceived as high-level satire at the time. And how simply being present for certain people would have been an act of political treason, and that Jesus knew that, and was willing to show up anyway, which ultimately led to his death.
Jesus was snarky and funny and emotional. He was introverted and contrary and subversive. He walked around with a Mardi Gras-esque parade of misfits and outcasts following him and loving each other and having a great time. (More honesty: The doorway to my learning to love Jesus was the realization that we probably would have hung out in college.)
Jesus sat with the least of these. He fed them and touched them and reminded them they are holy, worthy, and loved. He was about taboos. He talked to people who had been ostracized and invited them back to the party. He shone light on places others insisted on hiding. And he did all of that knowing he would be killed for it.
And knowing that he would come back from death, the deepest shadow, to preach the message that no amount of darkness is final. If we are willing to keep going, we will always come back out into the light.
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There is so much more I want to say to her, this girl at the end of the altar rail. But it’s not my place, and I can only pray that receiving communion and hearing the message preached here is enough. “The blood of Christ, poured out for you,” I say.
You who have faced such despair, you knew nothing else to do but consider suicide. You who fought through darkness and came back out into the light. You who are a living, breathing example of resurrection and choose to wear your story of hope on your skin… Jesus was about you. Jesus would have walked with you, talked with you, listened to you. Jesus would have seen and today sees your good, worthy holiness. This blood? It was for you. You are invited to the eternal Mardi Gras parade as a full-fledged, valued member of the group. Jesus wants you to know that. He wants you to walk up front, not in the shadows, but in the light. He wants you to be full and fed and joyful. Because he loves you. Because you are worthy of being loved.
More than a year after stepping back into the church, I get what he was about and why generations of people have looked to him as an example of love. Love isn’t always warm-fuzzies. Sometimes it is fierce and snarky and weird and subversive. And sometimes it’s those things because that’s how we need to be loved.
I move onto the next person with tears in my eyes. I realize that this person–and the next, and the next–might also have a story of overcoming darkness, just like the girl with the semicolon tattoo. And so, I put more meaning into my words–hoping they feel the the truth behind them–but knowing Jesus is patient enough to reveal himself in whatever way that person needs, just for them.
Right now, it’s enough to say, “The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”
