Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured, and we assume that it was a wonderful experience. And so it was, but maybe not in the way we think. What if the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus at that moment was the face of utter human vulnerability?
Meeting us on the road of despair, Jesus reveals to us that suffering and defeat are God’s means of bringing new life and hope.
Jesus died an apparent failure, but in his resurrection, the failure’s power over us is broken for ever.
In the violence and suffering that surround the Christmas story, we find the revelation of a God who does not inflict violence and suffering, but suffers violence to bring love and peace.
Events of global chaos probably aren’t signs of God’s next big move, but we need to take seriously the call to live faithfully and courageously in the midst of them.
Honestly owning the rage that sometimes consumes us is an important part of maintaining our resistance to all that stands in the way of a Jesus-shaped life.
Sometimes God has to kill off our hopes and destroy our faith structures in order to create space for new life and truth to arise among us.
The resurrection awaits us. It awaits us now as we live into our experience of the love of God, growing in us and through us. The resurrection awaits us too, that moment when life as we know it is no more, and we enter fully into the life and love of God.
Jesus is heart-broken when we refuse his call to gather with him in a place of powerlessness, vulnerable to the hostility of a power-hungry world.
Jesus came into the world to fill us with new life, and encourage us, and show us how to grow, so if we remain focussed on the light, letting it shine into our areas of darkness, then darkness will never have the last word.
When we respond to the call to model our lives on his life, the life of the One who has seen the Father, then, like him, we must not sidestep or avoid suffering.
In times when we strive to see but cannot, when we struggle to understand and can find no satisfactory answers in the face of issues that confuse us, we can still search for communion with the one who knows all things, who understands all things.
Our anticipation of new life in Christ, though not removing all grief, allows us to find hope in the mercy and love of God.
Christ’s grief gathers up our griefs and achieves the promise of a day when tears will be no more.
Though the experience of grief often feels like an absence of God, it is a deep experience of the heart of God, and is symbolised as such in the brokenness of the Eucharist.
The unfailing love of God is with us, even in the tragedy, confusion, and anguished questions and doubts.
The revelation of what God is on about in Christ will always upend our expectations and disrupt our lives.
In the face of monumental devastation and suffering, God speaks a word, and the word becomes flesh.
Lent can be a dark night filled with tears and mourning and loss, but it is worth it, for God’s joy comes in the morning.
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur Massacre, we need to see what it means to follow Christ through the valley of death.