Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.
Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.
Expecting God to always appear as an exalted triumphant victor blinds us to the reality of God’s glory which is made known in suffering, self-sacrificial love.
Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.
Jesus calls us to model a pattern of love and generous inclusion, and to avoid the demonic temptations of exclusion and pride.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.
Jesus calls us to courageously follow him through a world of apparently apocalyptic violence towards the advent of hope and peace.
Jesus affirms generous giving, but he also condemns the religious exploitation of generous givers.
God wants love rather than sacrifice, but in a fallen world love that is genuine will often be sacrificial.
The capacity to understand and follow the way of Jesus is a miraculous gift.
In the sacraments, Jesus constantly calls us to follow him in giving up conventional notions of honour and offer ourselves for the life of the world.
Jesus’s abolition of “us” and “them” categories is so radical that it seems almost impossible for us to comprehend and put into practice.
Jesus offers himself to us to serve and bless us, and calls us to do the same in serving and blessing others.
It is human nature to think that our ways are God’s ways, and so to shun those whose ways seem alien or disgusting to us, but Jesus calls us to recognise God at work in others, however different.
Like the disciples, we stumble, but we too can pick ourselves up and re-orient ourselves to the transformed landscape that Jesus is slowly mapping out for us.
Jesus breaks down the barriers that divide us into pure and impure and removes the cause for the fear that marginalises people.
On our own we are powerless to deal with many of the things that confront us, but when we recognise that and make ourselves available for whatever God wants to do, all kinds of scary things may actually be possible.
Unquestioning allegiances to family and nation keep us bound to satanic systems, but Jesus binds the satan and breaks us free to be the new family of God.
The resurrection of Jesus is the most confronting and terrifying news imaginable, and all we can do (after trying to run) is surrender ourselves to his grace.
In Christ we are set free from all that would oppress us in order that we might be free to live in gracious and life-giving service of God and others.