Elisabeth Wentworth: According to John

According to John                                              

They pester me to write it down.

These Ephesians exhaust me with their demands.

They tell me I am the last, and I am failing,

They want an eyewitness account

Before the florid re-writing begins

By those who were not there.

I will do it for his sake; I will grumble and grieve

In equal measure but I will tell the truth.

It is not a complex story—why can’t they just believe?

Yes, there were miracles,

They can never hear enough of those

And still they miss the point.

He did not raise Lazarus to please the crowd,

He showed him how to breathe

And left him with the choice.

It should not surprise me,

We were most of us blind to the truth

Needing proof even as he walked amongst us.

All I knew was that I loved him the most

In the there and then of those days on the roads,

On the way to the places where he made his name,

By the sea, on the hills, talking as we walked,

Eating well if Judas had enough in the common purse.

I suppose the others hoped for another kind of warrior

But he came bearing the arms his father gave him

To give to us, and thought they would be visible

To all—love, courage, compassion, truth—

The heart of this story is that he was one of us,

The only human emotion he never showed was fear.

I worry now we might have dared him to die—

Give us one more miracle and then we will believe!

Even so, they were nowhere to be seen at the end.

The sons of Zebedee (Sons of Thunder he called us)

Honoured our father’s name: we were there.

And the women: his mother who became my mother

And I her son by his declaration in the dying hours.

He saw that we would need the gift

to bear the loss.

                                                  Elisabeth Wentworth