photo #8742835

The smell hits you first. Urine. Human or animal, doesn’t matter. Excrement baking in August heat. Week-old BO. Rotten bananas bleeding through torn plastic. I’m hooking cables to the dumpster when I see them. Thousands. Maggots. Writhing. Aimless. Blind. Going nowhere. Born in filth. Living in filth. Dying in filth. I pity the pathetic bastards. Then God speaks. Not audibly. He doesn’t do parlor tricks. But the thought lands like a hammer: That’s you. Religion is for the weak. I know. I’ve been that weak. Sunday morning. Third row. Bible open. Taking notes like I’m supposed to. Pastor’s talking about grace. I’m thinking about the guy in the row behind me. Divorced twice. Can’t keep a job. Probably high right now. “Thank God I’m not like him.” There it is. That prayer. The Pharisee’s prayer. Luke 18. The one Jesus condemned. But I know my Bible. I tithe. I show up. I’m just like the maggot in the dumpster. Just cleaner on the outside. His name was Tommy. Face like a road map of bad decisions. “F—ing Jesus, beautiful Jesus, got any cash?” Shaking. Sweating. Begging the God he’d forget by tomorrow. I gave him five bucks. He bought meth. I knew he would. But I needed to feel better about myself. My five dollars of righteousness. My participation trophy for caring. Tommy’s still shaking. I’m still judging. Both maggots. Different dumpsters. Sarah. Tuesday night prayer request. Same one for three years. “Pray my boyfriend becomes the man God called him to be.” You mean husband? No. Boyfriend. Five years. Two kids. No ring. But we nod. Pray. Pretend God’s gonna fix what she won’t confront. Dime-store prayers for a man who’s married to himself. She’s praying. He’s not changing. Both pretending it’s working. I know the guy in the truck. Crying to God about something. Making promises he won’t keep. I know because I’ve prayed those prayers. Empty words to a God I talk about more than I talk to. I know the Bible. Chapter and verse. Can quote Romans 8. Explain justification. But do I know God? Or do I just know about God? There’s a difference. One’s information. One’s intimacy. I’ve got plenty of the first. Not much of the second. The Cross. God looked at the dumpster—at Tommy shaking for his next hit, at Sarah praying for a boyfriend-husband, at me with my Bible knowledge and my religious pride, at you holding whatever you’re holding And said: I’m coming in. Not to throw us out. To join us. To become us. To die as us. On it, a naked Jew. Not a Viking. Not Jim Caviezel with good lighting and a carefully placed loincloth. A Jew. Alone. Naked. A maggot to society. Isaiah 53: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Read it again. Slower. “We hid as it were our faces from him.” We. Not them. We. You would’ve crossed the street. Turned your head. Found something suddenly interesting in the other direction. I know I would have. The crowds mock. Spit. Guy in the corner making crude gestures. Laughing. Pointing at God’s naked body. Philippians 2: “He made himself of no reputation.” No reputation. The God who spoke galaxies into existence made Himself nothing. Lower than Tommy. Lower than Sarah’s boyfriend. Lower than the guy who knows his Bible but not his God. Lower than you. “And became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” He was covered in spit. Blood. Urine from guards who mocked Him. Feces probably, from hours hanging there. Flies landing on wounds. Open. Infected. Rotting before He died. He looked like the dumpster I’m staring at. Smelled worse. And I wouldn’t have touched Him. Would you? That’s not religion. Religion builds temples and demands you clean up before entering. Religion says: “Stop being a maggot, then God will love you.” The Cross says: “God became a maggot because He already loves you.” —TBM