If you’ve ever read St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in particular Chapter 9, and have understood what St Paul is saying there, you will have been shocked. It makes perfect sense to the reason; it does not defy or run contrary to our innate human logical sense; but all the same the sense of the words comprise ‘a hard saying’ for any person having a general care for humankind, and who has hope for us all a better place hereafter…..

It is the logic of The Law

The rigour of The Old Dispensation

It is iterated in The Pentateuch,

In The Prophetic Books

Though the exact conception never passes Jesus’ lips..?

A logic passing like a knife, slicing the heart it rips

Pharaoh’s a puppet, raised only to fall,

Under the bus in the last act in a Music Hall

He cannot do but what his lot demands him

A vessel made to wrath

Sink not, nor pity, love is just - grammercy...

Thought must prevail, be clear and ultra sound...

What posture should I use to whom I see as doomed?

Can I refrain from tagging scoffing rakes to hell?

Am I a Christian? being so conformable.

The dark corridors to which a human must not go

Answering calls are God’s on pre-set party lines

Delving a lucky dip of jaws and teeth; in fine

Backing in a corner, to the wall, iniquity

Being an Evil Hammer, by force of Infinity

The lectors who sew and brew and boldly codify,

Setting in order; quarter straits on winds that blow

Whence from, where to, only The Spirit follows, knows;

By placing of Grace in frangible, effectually dead hands

Something for human understanding basic, satisfying,

Ingénues offer ideal eyes and lights, do prophesy

Those pristine pearls of Christ took tarnish; look upon

The waning of the aura of His opulent persona

(Dazzling Embezzler of dearest hardihoods of men,

A Marvellous Aviator into ether had ascended)

Had left the world to us; ourselves the worldly,

That entered even into scriptures, some do say,

(Which ‘out of time’ were written, made by ardent satellites)

A falling-off; and who, set next to Christ, can criticise

Those acolytes who keenly stoke some regimen?

Even His worldly Presence could not, cannot be, endured

Some shifts to salve us need be - even the didache

Resorted under shelters from His batteries of kind

Rebuking love gunning with words chrysostome.

We run for succour to ‘The Old Adam’, our absorbent fender

Nor cannot suffer too much sempiternal verity

The devil is a learned angel, deep in book lore

Whereby he gets his wiles and fortifies his looms

Winds tangles out of angles to a certitude and back,

Studding cut-gem bon mots in turns and sleights of hand.

Oh, what a spinner; Oh, watch The Adversary dance!

The centre of settled goodness is a place for evil;

Makes entry in; a sidling unobtrusive visit

Smoothing-off ruffles, interposing casual suggestion

Softening resolve by fawning seminal seductions;

“Yours is the voice of God; unlock, deliver, unctions.”

But eidolons, and God, perhaps, are indecipherable?

Mystery His dinner, slippers, pipe and tea,

That only the eglantine and ivy know of it,

And men go send to Jesus for a working likeness

Where what you get is quite precisely what you see.

Indescribable, unfathomable, behovely gracious

In extremis; so much baffling, large-attraction-rich,

Compassionate gentle graces waken you at every word

The Finer, The Fuller, permits our unease run condemning

Reckoning up the bill we owe, which He defraying

Cannot, I’m praying, ask that any waste be scattered

Of blood and water, spirit, sacrifice

On thorny ground where tares absorb, and gathered latter

Days, are heaped, and thrown into Gehenna -

Faustus one drop his soul cried out for – mercy mother!

Nor never does Jesus Christ use closed-ends formulations

His gospels refuse all set-in-stone divisions, destinations,

Words spill from Paschal lips sublime, solicitous, irenic;

We all, it seems, are sweet invited; both blighted and serene,

Gentile and Jew, accrue to universal fellowship