Fringe

Perhaps with the bruises and sweat-burned vision of defeat

Comes a fork in the road that the jaded are forced to face

To one side a purely enlivened tilt toward stark truth

And to the other an abandoned farmhouse swirling on

The fringe of a black hole mentality where the poets

And the scientists hedge their bets on a rainbow of pills

With a periodic table of excuses born for

The purpose of blinding their eyes and stopping their own ears

To escape white noise blaring from their own gray matter

Pray I choose the former rather than the hollow latter

—

From Devotions For Ragamuffins by Brennan Manning, Pp.6

Jesus Christ is not only the center of the gospel but the whole gospel. The four evangelists never focus on another personality. Fringe people stay on the fringe, marginal men remain on the periphery. No one else is allowed to take center stage. Various individuals are introduced only to interrogate, respond, or react to Jesus. Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Peter, Thomas, Caiphas, Pilate, and a score of others are background to the person of Jesus. He dwarfs everyone else. This is as it should be, because the New Testament is a time of salvation. When the final curtain falls, Jesus will upstage all the famous, beautiful, and powerful people who have ever lived in the course of human history. Every person will be seen as responding to Jesus. T.S. Eliot put it, “O my soul, be prepared to meet him who knows how to ask questions.” This is the proper theological understanding of the New Testament and the eschatological Lordship of Jesus Christ.