There is the deep magic of the prophetic voice as it speaks of the one to come, and how he will be treated, and what that treatment will accomplish. But there is an even deeper magic here. God was pleased to allow God's own face to be bruised, that in God's own face there would be no beauty that we should desire. God bore our own likeness in God's own self to such a degree that he became a god that would bruise and wound its own creation. That it would become an angry, jealous tyrant laying waste its own creation in fits of rage by flood and pestilence and sword. That it would strike its servant dead for daring to reach out and steady the Ark of its very Covenant. That it would rejoice as the heads of infants were dashed against the rocks.
This is Odin, becoming stronger as the blood of the fallen flows. This is Kali dancing on the body of her beloved. This is the Morrígan, washing the bloodstained garments of those about to die. This is the very creator, being birthed into its own creation as a projection of our own duality of darkness and light. Just as all gods arise out of our collective unconsciousness, bearing to their very core the conflicted iniquity and beauty of us all.
And why should this god be any different? Why should this god not die, as all gods die, when they have worn out their welcome. When we have hid our faces from them and despised them for their ugliness, their pettiness, and their ultimate ineffectiveness.
And yet here is deepest magic of all. Here is a god who did not just take upon itself the punishment for our sins. Here is a god who suffered itself to BECOME sin. Here is a god become so twisted and depraved that it would birth an entire race of children with the express intention of killing (or in some versions eternally torturing) all but a small remnant. A god become the ugly thing that clawed and crawled its way out of the darkest places of the human heart, gorging on the body and blood of sacrifice, until one day we could no longer keep pretending we believed.
And on the day of our unbelief this god died. And it is good that this god died. For when a god dies, might not something it is bearing in its own body die with it?
But the story didn't die. A myth is woven into the fabric of the universe. And in the telling and retelling the myth is being redeemed. The story is being rehabilitated. The monsters of our own creation come to be seen as more than they once appeared. There is beauty, truth and goodness woven into the tapestry of sorrow, death and pain.
We get the god we ask for. We get the only god our imaginations are able to conceive. And as we grow to ask for better gods we begin to catch a glimpse of what was always there behind the veil. Of that which the seers and the prophets, the oracles and the shaman, the dreamers and the mystics, have been hinting at, however imperfectly, all along.
The death of Jesus was apropos: all gods must die.
Then when the ship rode the water, fires mounted on the ship. And in the blaze of the fires one was seen bending over the body of Baldur and whispering a father's last farewell into his dead son's ear. It was Odin All-Father. Then Odin went down off the ship and all the fires rose into a mighty burning. Speechlessly the Æsir and the Vanir watched with tears streaming down their faces while all things lamented, crying, "Baldur the Beautiful is dead, is dead." -Norse myth
The Son...can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. -John 5:19But stories don't end, they get retold. And the tale grows in the telling. And one day we'll tell it aright.
The arc becomes a circle.
As above, so below.
