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Friday, 09 January 2004 |
THE BOOK OF MICHAEL
1) And it came to pass that it was a black night in Nazareth.
2) The rain lashed down. The wind whipped the wet sand into cakes of mud
and beat them into the walls. The boy sat shivering in the cold. He had
nowhere to go. He was an orphan. He was a child of the streets. Unloved.
Uncared for. Unfed. Unwell. Unhappy.
3) The man passed by swiftly on his way home. He wrapped his cloak around
him and turned his head from the gale, so he almost missed the tiny huddle
of shivering humanity pushed into the corner.
4) "Go home, boy", he shouted. "I have no home, sir", said the boy.
5) The man sized up the situation. The child would die if he left him out
here in the open. Picking him up in his arms, light as a baby bird or a
bundle of twigs, he carried him home. He washed him. He laid him in his
own bed. He did this because he had compassion.
6) But compassion did not play well in society. The media mocked him,
turning his charity into lust and perversion. The people wanted criminals
and victims. They didn't want compassion. So they set the Lord High Justice
Tom Sneddon onto the case, to prove that it was not natural to care for a
boy.
7) Already they had stoned to death JONATHAN THE BAPTIST who had believed
in the integrity of teenagers and who had dared to ask, many decades
earlier, for their opinions on music. He, too, had suffered the twisting
of truth in the war of the death of innocence.
8) They crucified the man on the cross of sensationalism.
9) And the heavens cracked open and the darkness that split the skies was
the evil of Satan as he triumphed over kindness.
10) And the people cheered and clapped because they enjoyed the spectacle
of fallen idols. So they applauded the tragedy without realising that it
was their own deaths they were encouraging. The very fabric of humanity
was being destroyed in order to feed their cynical desire for blood.
11) And the Devil was pleased because his plan had succeeded.
12) The soldiers gave him vinegar to drink because it was sour and they
soaked it into a sponge because they loved sponges.
13) And the Lord God cried at the demise of decency. And the world came to
an end.
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