“But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.'” – Mark 10:5

The wreckage left by hardened hearts
includes the charioteers of Pharaoh,
swept away by churning waters of the sea.
The murmurers of Meribah, the fallen kings
of Canaan, even Babylon the proud,
lie in the rubble of their stony hearts.

How curious that there should be a law
accommodating a so-painful thing
as calcined cardia. How strange to say
this pain, this hurt, will come, and we
cannot avoid the fault lines of
a marriage. Let crevasses divide.

But Jesus called it out for what it was,
for hearts go cold to set aside the pain,
and so inflict the hurt upon the other. Then
we must admit that Moses had it right,
that weeping lovers walk away in order that
old wounds might heal, new wounds avoid.

Yet wounds they are and still remain,
inflicted in the adamant of soul,
and rising emerge as grieving tears,
while Jesus weeps for what, with open heart,
need not have been.

A poem/prayer based on Mark 10:2-16, the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year B, Proper 22 (27).

The image is by muffinn from Worcester, UK – Madeira – Ribeira Brava – heart-shaped stone, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58001718.