" 'No, no, wait, Lord, there's something wrong with this!'

" 'You always forget yourself and to whom you are speaking,' He said kindly, the mixture of human and divine continuing to obsess me as I looked at Him, falling into His beauty and staggered by His divinity, and overcome again and again by my own sure belief that this was all wrong.

" 'Memnoch, I've just told you what no one knows but Me,' He said. 'Don't speak to me as if I can be wrong. Don't waste these moments with the Son of God! Can't you learn from me in the flesh as you learn from humans in flesh? Have I nothing to teach you, my beloved Archangel? Why do you sit here questioning me? What could possibly be the meaning of your word, wrong?'

" 'I don't know, Lord, I don't know how to answer. I can't find all the words. I just know this is not going to work. First of all, who will do this torturing and killing?'

" 'The people of Jerusalem,' He said. 'I will succeed in offending everyone, the traditional Hebrews, the callous Romans, everyone will be offended by the blinding message of pure love and what love demands of humans. I will show contempt for the ways of others, for their rituals and their laws. And into the machinery of their justice I will fall.

" 'I will be condemned on charges of treason when I speak of my Divinity, that I am the Son of God, God Incarnate ...and for my very message I will be tortured with such embellishment that it will never be forgotten; my death, by crucifixion, is going to be the same.'

" 'By crucifixion? Lord, have you see men die in this way? Do you know how they suffer? They are nailed to the wood and they suffocate, hanging as they do, weakening, unable to lift their own weight on their nailed feet, and finally strangling in blood and in pain?'

" 'Of course I've seen it. It's a common form of execution. It's filthy and it's very human.'

" 'Oh, no, no,' I cried out. 'This can't be. You don't mean to climax your teachings with such spectacular failure and execution, with such cruelty and death itself!'

" 'This is not failure,' he said. 'Memnoch, I shall be a martyr to what I teach! Blood offerings of the innocent lamb to the good God have been made since Humans began!

They instinctively render to God what is of great value to them to show their love.

Who knows better than you who spied on their altars and listened to their prayers and insisted that I listen! Sacrifice and love are connected in them.'

" 'Lord, they sacrifice out of fear! It has nothing to do with love of God, does it? All the sacrifices? The children sacrificed to Baal, and a hundred other hideous rituals the world over. They do it out of fear! Why would love demand sacrifice?'