How might the biblical witness and the Eucharistic meal set before us shed light on our sense of vocation, on the offerings we seek to bring, individually and collectively?
How might the biblical witness and the Eucharistic meal set before us shed light on our sense of vocation, on the offerings we seek to bring, individually and collectively?
God has created us for relationships, and any values or priorities that are willing to sacrifice relationship for something else will cripple us.
When we follow Christ in being pain-bearers, we are participating in the reconciliation of the world.
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.
In Christ we are one with all flesh and blood, and so our struggle is not against any other people, but against the spirits and powers and forces which would divide people and make them enemies.
Jesus breaks down the barriers that divide us into pure and impure and removes the cause for the fear that marginalises people.
The Church is one body, sent into the world to live the life Jesus has begun, a life of love, reconciliation and mercy.
With Jesus we are baptised into a Spirit-inspired costly life of living the new culture of scandalous reconciliation.
Though we get caught up in violent rivalries like Herod, God breaks through with the promise of a new kingdom where all are honoured.
Are we, individually and together, focused on the things that we can be doing, that will enable us to embrace and nurture the growth of Christ’s values, withstanding opposition to them?
Jesus and the Canaanite woman bring us along with them into a new understanding of what defiles, and what makes us clean and whole.
Social labels and divisions keep us parched and thirsting for intimacy and community, but Jesus seeks to break through them and give us the living water of love and acceptance.
The salvation of the world lies in Jesus’ model of non-retaliation.
God’s anger over injustice and hypocrisy is the hot passionate anger of a lover betrayed and aggrieved, an anger which craves reconciliation and rekindled love, not punishment.
The knowledge that we are loved by God and the tenacious sharing of that love break the power of the world’s systems to lock us in to destructive cycles overwork, over consumption, and compliance with injustice and war.
We have become exiled from our destiny as God’s children, but Jesus has been born among us to reveal to us and restore us to that destiny.
In God’s coming reign, things we find impossible to reconcile will be reconciled.
Jesus commits himself to the path of redemptive suffering in preference to either fight or flight, and he calls us to follow him in that commitment.
Reconciliation begins with my ‘self’, and then, as I let go the fears, the guilt, the self justification, I might just possibly become an agent for peace.
The message of the cross cuts against everything that would divide us from one another, and so cuts against everything that would drive us out.