Author: relationalrealities

Episcopal Priest currently Rector of St Martin's Providence, RI

Of Shepherds and Other Things

In John 10, we encounter Jesus’ riff on an extended metaphor of sheep and shepherds. I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life – that is, life no longer subject to the restriction of temporal time.

Here are two seemingly contrasting shepherding images.

My nephew, Hamish, is a sheep farmer in the South Canterbury high country in the foothills of the Southern Alps – the mountain backbone of New Zealand’s South Island. This is Lord of the Rings country. Not the idyllic landscapes of the Shire but the astonishingly majestic terrain framed by the dark mountains of Mordor. Across 60,000 acres of tussock grassland, amid rocky crags and sharp ravines, Hamish runs around 12000 Marino sheep bred for the fineness of their wool, much prized by Italy’s fashion houses.

One day, during a visit some years ago, with Murray, Hamish’s father, we suddenly stopped as Murray leapt out of the cab of the truck and bounded down a steep-sided gully to where a ewe had been caught by its dense wool in a thorn tree, known locally as a Lawyer Bush because the saying goes, once caught you’ll never get free. Cutting the ewe free, he hoisted it in one smooth movement onto his shoulders, and with the ewe draped around his neck, he climbed back up, depositing it on the truck bed before we drove off.

B.W. Johnson in The People’s New Testament, his 1891 bible commentary, recalls the following.

As we ate and looked, almost spellbound, the silent hillsides around us were in a moment filled with sounds and life. The shepherds led their flocks forth from the gates of the city. They were in full view and we watched and listened to them with no little interest. Thousands of sheep and goats were there in dense, confused masses. The shepherds stood together until all came out. Then they separated, each shepherd taking a different path, and uttering, as he advanced, a shrill, peculiar call. The sheep heard them. At first the masses swayed and moved as if shaken with some internal convulsion; then points struck out in the direction taken by the shepherds; these became longer and longer, until the confused masses were resolved into long, living streams, flowing after their leaders. Such a sight was not new to me, still it had lost none of its interest. It was, perhaps, one of the most vivid illustrations which human eyes could witness of that beautiful discourse of our Savior recorded by John.

Johnson’s almost biblical depiction of shepherds leading their sheep over rocky hillsides is not an image that translates well to modern NZ shepherding. The NZ sheep farmer is more herder than shepherd as he stands to the side, he commands his sheepdogs with piercingly high whistles produced by use of a flat plastic device held between the teeth. With much barking and nipping of sheep heels the dogs gather and drive the herd on.

Unlike Johnson’s scene, which is so strongly reminiscent of Jesus’ Good Shepherd imagery, there is little sense of this kind of intimacy between Kiwi shepherd and sheep. Yet, in the moment when Murray bounded off to retrieve his solitary ewe, the power of the biblical image of the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 to go in search of the one lost sheep communicated an unexpected intimacy.

I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life – that is, timeless life as in life unrestricted by the limitations of temporal time.

In 2025, the good shepherd imagery of Jesus in John’s Gospel occurs on the second Sunday in May, otherwise known as Mother’s Day. Whether by design or not, it’s an interesting coincidence that emboldens me to reframe Jesus’ good shepherd metaphor as: I am the good mother. My children hear my voice. I know them, and they trust me. I give them eternal life—a life of relationship with me that cannot be measured or restricted by the limitations imposed by temporal time.

We hear Jesus’ voice -to quote from TS Eliot in Little Gidding:

a voice … not known, because not looked for -but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.

The voice of the good mother is the voice heard, and yet not heard, remembered, and yet not looked for, but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of our memory.

This half-remembered yet forgotten voice enters our lives through the earliest experience at our mother’s breast—if not while we are still in utero. Nurture echoes nature. The human bond of mother and child echoes the bond between God and humanity. Jesus says, I am the good mother. My children hear my voice, I know them, and they trust me.

In John’s Christology, there is no distinction between Jesus the Logos and God the Creator; in each, the other finds its reflection. God, the good shepherd, enters our human experience at first as God the good mother. We learn to trust God, the good mother, who calls us each by name and protects us from danger, because like a mother, God has first loved us with a quality of unconditionality that is breathtaking to contemplate.

Imagine being loved because you are already good enough. The problem for many of us is that it requires courage and faith to see ourselves as God, the good mother, sees us.

Jesus’ voice is heard and yet half heard, remembered, and yet not looked for, but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of early memory. Jesus, the good shepherd, enters our lives through our experience of the divine good mother.

Donald Winnicott, the renowned 20th-century British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “good-enough mother.” Winnicott’s legacy has been a formative influence on my evolution as a psychotherapist and priest.

By good enough, Winnicott meant that mothers did not need to be perfect. The mother-infant relationship, though vulnerable to mishap, is also robust and able to withstand imperfect conditions. The reminder that mothers need to be good enough and not perfect is a reminder that the quest for the perfect in this arena of life is certainly the enemy of the good. The essence of a good-enough experience of mothering lies in our experience of love that is simply consistent and unconditional.

Many feel as a lifelong absence the early lack of the unconditional love of the good-enough mother. Maternal failure is often due to a perfect storm of emotional and environmental failures that interrupt or prevent the formation of a good-enough mother-infant bond. Yet, if we didn’t find the memory of good-enoughness in our early experience with our mothers, maybe we found it through good-enoughness in the love of a grandmother or grandfather, in the compensating love of an aunt or uncle, or even later, a devoted teacher or mentor. Good-enough mothering, though more usually exercised by women, is nevertheless a universal human quality found in the rich variety of human relationships.

Yet an early experience of a disinterested or unavailable mother will leave its mark.  An early experience of the promise of love being restricted by conditions – I will love you only if — is not an uncommon experience. Yet, there are very few people who cannot locate an experience of unconditional love somewhere in their early formation.

Jesus says I am the good-enough mother. I have no choice; for I cannot -not – love my children and give them eternal life, that is, life that cannot be restricted by the limitation of temporal time.

Our lives are bounded between the bookends of Jesus’s resurrection as the first fruits of the hope for new life and the promise of the resurrection of the entire creation at the end of time. Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life. Eternal life is realizing the promise of good-enough love extended to all.”

America stands out among developed Western nations as a society that continually fails those entrusted with the sacred responsibility for mothering. In a country that eulogizes motherhood and apple pie, the US ranks very low on the scale of nations where public policy concretely supports family life and child development. A society configured by the divine mothering template will ensure maternal and paternal paid leave, supported childcare, public pre-school and kindergarten education free at the point of use. The paradox at the heart of American society concerns the disproportion between our passion for the unborn and our social neglect of the born.

Human mothering only needs to be good enough, not perfect.  For some of us, Mother’s Day will be an opportunity to reaffirm the heart-felt forgiveness that soothes the discordant strings of early memory. For most of us, Mother’s Day will be an opportunity to express feelings of gratitude for the love our mothers gave us. Whichever may be the case, for each one of us, the divine good mother encourages us to be good-enough mothers to those who trust us to love and care for them.

I am the good shepherd. My sheep hear my voice – a voice … not known, because not looked for -but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea; – a voice not heard but remembered; a voice not looked for but viscerally felt; a voice we trust because it resonates through the finely tuned strings of our memory.

My sheep know my voice, they follow me, and I give them eternal life – a life that is not restricted by the limitations imposed by temporal time.

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On The Damascus Road

In the early weeks of the Easter Season, the Lectionary focuses on a series of appearances in which the post-resurrection Christ – still recognizable as the pre-resurrection Jesus – drops in on the ongoing lives of his disciples. The gospels contain 13 post-resurrection appearance stories. The gospel for the third Sunday after Easter from John 21 offers us a classic example of Jesus appearing to the fisherman disciples – wearily returning to the shore after a fruitless night’s fishing.

Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances often spark an arid debate about whether he physically appeared to his followers or whether they simply imagined him doing so. We have a ridiculous modern preoccupation with dividing human experience between what might be called external, verifiable, objective experience, and internal psychological-imaginative, subjective experience. Put simply, the argument is over whether they happened or were the product of imagination.

This debate rests on some big materialist assumptions about what is real and what is not. This is an arid dispute, argument, debate, or however you want to describe it, because it misses the essential point of the reports of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are real if real is defined as having an impact to change lives.

Alongside John 21, on the third Sunday after Easter, we have an epistle reading from Luke-Acts chapter 9, describing Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to one Saul on the road to Damascus. There is no debate to be had here. This is a psychological-spiritual event that registers in Saul’s imagination. Only he sees the blinding light and hears Jesus’ voice. Nevertheless, this is a real event if real is defined by discernible and verifiable impact, i.e., the power to change the direction of Saul’s life.

We know Paul through his letters to his fledgling house church communities. We also know Paul through Luke’s account of his missionary journeys. Luke begins his missionary biography of Paul with the famous incident on the Damascus Road – a devastating spiritual confrontation that was to change everything for Paul. Thanks to Luke, we come to know Paul, less as the writer of letters but as a protagonist in a grand historical drama chronicling the spread in antiquity of what will come to be known as Christianity. Yet, Luke is not only interested in recording the grand epic of the Church’ rise but also has an ear for the personal. In Luke-Acts we meet Paul as a man struggling with an internal identity conflict. For Paul was once Saul and it’s with Saul that Luke begins his biography of Paul.

Saul was a product of the amazingly cosmopolitan world of antiquity. Born into a family of the Jewish diaspora living in the Greek-speaking city of Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia, and thus a Roman citizen, Saul was educated in Jerusalem – a student of the famous teacher Gamaliel. Educated in the strictest observance of the Pharisee tradition, Saul became zealous for the God of Israel.

While traveling on a commission from the Sanhedrin to root out the followers of Jesus in Damascus, Saul is blinded by a blazing light – a moment of complete sensory overload. Blinded, he falls from his horse and hears a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Left in a state of physical blindness and bodily paralysis, the voice tells him, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Picked up from the ground by his startled companions, Saul – now blind – is led into the city.

Saul is sequestered for three days. Luke does not want us to miss the symbolism of Jesus’ three days in the tomb. Saul, neither eating, drinking, nor sleeping, remains in this state of extreme sensory deprivation as he undergoes a death of self involving a dramatic spiritual and psychological reconstruction. With the return of his sight, a new worldview greets him. Symbolic of this dramatic change, the zealous Saul has been reborn as Paul, transformed by his encounter with the post-resurrection Christ.

The expression a Damascus Road experience has become an idiom for a 180-degree change in a person’s view of self and the world. After his encounter on the road to Damascus, Saul has a kind of death, resurrection, and Pentecost experience rolled into one – after which he too can claim to have seen the risen Lord. Like Peter and the other disciples – who by their encounters with the risen Christ are transformed from disciples – followers, into apostles – messengers, Paul is similarly transformed – but for him the transformation is from persecutor to apostle. Paul leaves behind his national-ethnic God of rage and fear, a God of them and us, a God whose followers must find an endless supply of scapegoats to carry away their unacknowledged projections of guilt and fear – and encounters a God of love, mercy, and inclusion.

Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, through his letters to the various churches that sprang up in the wake of his missionary journeying, continued to articulate his experience of living in the painful tension between divine judgment and acceptance. Thus, at numerous points his letters make difficult and confusing reading as he flip-flops between being a truly ground-breaking visionary and remaining a man of his own time and place.

Our experience of the world is articulated through the stories we tell, both to ourselves and to one another. We are shaped and our world is given meaning by their telling. This is a good and a bad thing because if the story is poor, which I mean does not offer enough room for growth, we become constrained in our sense of identity and worldview. On the other hand, if the story is expansive, allowing us space to grow, then our sense of self and view of the world expands to include more and more of what is needed.

The resurrection is an expansive story that changes lives. It’s not a story to be believed or explained but to be lived. In living it, the resurrection story shapes the way we understand the nature of the world around us. The question I ask myself is one I also put to you – how do we live the resurrection story?

For some of us like Saul, being changed by an encounter with the risen Christ is a dramatic and devastating indictment on our former lives. Yet, for most of us, we encounter the risen Christ in the subtle opportunities for change amidst the routines of everyday life. We encounter the power of the resurrection story:

  • when we chose to be more courageous and less risk adverse
  • when we become more accepting and less judgmental of difference
  • when we face down our fears and cease being driven by them to seek others to blame
  • when we come to experience mercy as the first attribute of God
  • when the God of Mercy becomes also the God of Justice, that is love in action.

Today as we look at our world, among those who claim to speak for God it’s not hard to distinguish Saul’s voice from Paul’s. So many politicians and church people speak with the voice of Saul. This is the paranoid voice that demands the protection of religious liberty as the fig leaf for the denial of difference. It’s the voice that celebrates the limitations of culture as a rejection of God’s open-ended invitation to enter the new.

For Saul, persecution, imprisonment, and murder were all necessary tools to protect an angry God not able to withstand the imagined trauma of human questioning. For Paul, all that was needed was the law of love manifesting in vulnerability. After his experience on the Damascus Road, Paul knew that because of his vulnerability and weakness, God chose him to be the greatest apostle of inclusion, which is simply a way of describing the divine call to love in action.

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Imprinted by Faith

Image: Icon of the Resurrection by the Ukrainian icon writer Ivanka Demchuk. Unlike Western iconography of the resurrection, which portrays it as a Jesus-alone event, Orthodox iconography of the resurrection portrays Jesus raising Adam and Eve, symbolizing the general resurrection of the dead.

In her New York Times essay, The Prophetic, subtitled What American Literature’s Prophetic Voices Tell Us About Ourselves, the renowned writer Ayana Mathis in her first installment, titled Imprinted by Faith, recalls her childhood memories of growing up in a Black revivalist Christian tradition. She writes that:

the God of my revival childhood was all-powerful and relatively benevolent, but had a great many rules about what we should do  (go to church 3x a week, live by the Word of God, literally interpreted) and what we shouldn’t do (listen to secular music, play cards, watch movies, drink). These commitments and privations would be rewarded with God’s love, palpable, like a bird alighting on a shoulder.

She describes leaving this world behind with the memorable image of plunging into the world on the other side of the stained-glass window. Mathis views the beginnings of her adult journey as one of growing beyond her conservative Christian origins to become an artist. Her journey was a learning how to disbelieve while still being imprinted by belief.

How to disbelieve while remaining imprinted by belief struck a deep chord in me. Mathis asserts that American literature –and by extension mainstream American culture – remains imprinted by belief, freighted by ideas about morality, justice, and standards for living. Her assertion is that whatever the condition of our belief at the personal level – as in do we, or don’t we? – the cultural impact of belief remains imprinted on us. That, despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage.     

She notes that this Christian imprint has both good and not-so-beneficial consequences –in her phrase, it strikes a paradox. The Christian imprint on American society has often been used to perpetrate great evil. Christian Nationalism’s distortion of the Christian tradition is today still being used to justify racism’s doctrine of white supremacy, oppression of women and a multiplicity of other phobic responses to people of difference. Yet, at best, the Christian imprint continues to inspire decency and generosity, acting as a hedge against oversimplistic notions of society and the individual. Mathis’ assertion is that our Christian legacy asks us to truck in paradox, requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

Bracketing her personal references to a revivalist upbringing, Mathis nevertheless speaks for many of us – I suspect- here in this church on this Easter morning. As good-aspiring, middle-class, over-educated, professionally successful, and predominantly white Episcopalians, few of us would pass the orthodox belief and devotional piety smell test. Yet here we are on Easter Day. Some among us may be a little surprised to find ourselves sitting in these pews. Yet, nevertheless, we’re here, despite being unable to give a full account for why we have been drawn here.

Perhaps we’re being drawn by memories of an earlier phase of family life as children or as parents of young children? Maybe it’s the influence of friends drawing us here? Perhaps – and this is the best reason of all – we’re drawn here by cultural tradition – tradition as the imprint of belief upon our personal struggle with disbelief? Deep down, being here reflects a questioning of certainties -once easily taken or rejected at face value, but alas no longer so. Many of us have lost confidence in the belief that Jesus being raised from the dead means all is right in our lives and our world.

We wrangle with disbelief while remaining mysteriously imprinted by belief as we reach for a fingerhold—to say a foothold here would be to overstate our confidence – on what it means to live well with a hope that, at times, aspires to the level of real courage – a tentative purchase on what it means to live well with a love demonstrated through generous concern for others. In short, we long for lives of generous toleration and concern for our neighbor while seeking to grasp after something ineffable.

If faith is an imprint we absorb from the shape of the culture around us, then belief is neither something we can possess nor something we can lose. It’s like ebb tide in the morning, only to return with evening’s flow. Belief is the expression not so much of objective faith in a collection of doctrinal propositions but a heartfelt experience of being deeply imprinted by a story capable of fostering meaning and purpose in our lives. A large and expansive narrative capable of adjusting our orientation to the world in all its evil as well as its glory. Faith is the practice of wrangling contradictory realities in mind and on heart and finding in the wrangling sustenance and insight for living well.

As an example of wrangling paradox, many today reject institutional Christianity for deeply Christian reasons. They reject the institutional Church for failing to live up to the expectations set out in Jesus’ teaching and the Christian culture it has spawned. Often citing the teachings of Jesus, secular humanism rightly judges the Church for its hypocrisy, its love of earthly power, and its manifold human abuses.

Wrangling with paradox is further illustrated in the debate between Tom Holland, a British historian of classical antiquity and author of Dominion: How the Crucifixion Shaped the Values of the Modern World, and AC Grayling, Master of the New College of Humanities in London and a well-known humanist philosopher.

The central contention between them relates to the origin of our contemporary definition of human dignity and personhood. AC Grayling, in his militant rejection of Christianity, contends that the values of modern humanism – ideas about human dignity, social justice and inclusive standards for living – emerge from the Enlightenment’s rejection of religion. There is a wonderful exchange where Holland challenges him, saying that the humanist values we cherish today are not simply remnants of pre-Christian classical antiquity, lying around neglected until rediscovered in the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th century. Our contemporary humanist values – aspiring to do good; valuing ethical action; protection of the individual especially the weak against the strong; the cherishing of vulnerability as a strength and not simply a weakness to be crushed by the powerful; the belief that might is not right – are all the direct product of the Christian revolution in the first centuries of the current era.  Holland – with the historical evidence to support him – asserts our contemporary definition of what it means to be a human being flows directly from the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. He contends that modern humanist values are nowhere to be found in classical antiquity – a world where might was always right, where the weak were fair game for the strong, and where the only individuals with any rights were freeborn men – everyone else existing within various degrees of servitude and enslavement – in societies imprinted by not by faith but the crude transactional practice of calculated cruelty.

On Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week while exploring the clash of competing storylines intersecting with dire consequences for Jesus’ during his last week in Jerusalem, I predicted that we would eventually arrive at a new and more expansive storyline – that of God’s dream for the renewal of creation. As Christian believers, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the longed-for promised one who came to change everything. But whether we pass the belief smell test or not, at the very least we celebrate a story that revolutionized the ancient world and ushered in a new and vastly more compassionate understanding of what it means to be human.

This morning, I’m not interested in forensically deconstructing the evidence for or against the resurrection to ascertain in an arid attempt to prove it did or did not happen. All human meaning and purpose are narrative in origin—in other words, we only ever have the stories we construct to make sense of our experience in the world. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is a story that fundamentally changed our understanding of what being human looks like.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus introduced a new storyline in the collective consciousness of the West and among all who have come to the Christian faith—a more expansive story that continues to imprint itself upon our cultural experience regardless of whether we believe in its literal truth or not. In this sense, secular humanism is not the antidote to Christianity but its natural heir.

Despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage. This heritage struggles with a view of humanity shaped by Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – forcing us, in Mathis’ words, to truck in paradox – requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

The imprint of Christian faith shapes a cultural landscape where human dignity and Christian love, expressed as justice, are enshrined in the protections of the rule of law. The imprint of Christian faith, whether as cultural legacy or principled belief, empowers us to call out and resist the cyclic embrace of calculated cruelty as a transactional means to political ends – whether as remembered history or experienced within the flow of present-time current events.

But on Easter Day in 2025, you might want to ask, what about Jesus’s bodily resurrection? Well, there you have it—a curious paradox: Jesus died on the cross, but Christ was born in an empty tomb. To disbelieve while being imprinted by belief is the best description I can find for living with the paradox at the heart of our cultural landscape. Wrangling to disbelieve while still imprinted by faith, we should be careful not to rule anything out.

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Good Friday Meditation inspired by The Rose

The Rose, a song and lyrics by Bette Midler

Love hurts, and our hearts have an all too familiar affinity with suffering. Yet, if we dwell on our suffering, we are in danger of being little more than mere spectators of Jesus’ suffering on his way to the Cross.

It’s so easy to stand and watch from a safe distance, comforted by an image of Jesus as the noble hero valiantly traveling the route God has set for him, seemingly heedless of the costs because, after all, he knows ahead of time how things will end.

But we must go deeper than this if we are to move from spectators to participants in Jesus’ Passion. You see, if we are to be participants, then Jesus must be more like us than not. We are not noble heroes passing through the drama of our lives unscathed with complete foreknowledge. And so, if he is to be more like us, then neither is Jesus.

He treads his path, a path he chooses to accept – and like us, he knows little more than what is revealed as he takes each step, putting one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time. Jesus is no noble victim sacrificing his life for the sins of the world. If we just stop there, no matter how thankful we might feel, we fail to see that the way of the Cross is God’s invitation to become transformed not by suffering, but by the power of love. For Jesus’ chooses the way of love.

Some say love it is a river that drowns the tender reed, some say love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed, some say love it is a hunger an endless aching need. I say love, it is a flower, and you its only seed. ….

The Rose Verse 2

The Way of the Cross requires us nothing short of a transformation in our whole (moral, emotional, and spiritual) way of being. In Jesus, God’s hands get dirty as Jesus takes the initiative and leads us through example. Our acceptance, our entry into the way of love, involves risking as Jesus risked. Risk is the raw material for transformation for

It’s the heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taking, who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live …

Entering into the way of love leads us to challenge the status quo – taking risks and stepping out in faith rather than holding back in fear. As a community, it means uncovering and challenging the cosmic forces of dehumanization woven into the very DNA of our culture and its collective memory. In our confrontation with the forces of power and privilege that stand in opposition to the expectations of the Kingdom of God, we may often fail, but we cannot be defeated. Failure is a temporary setback, not an ultimate defeat of God’s purposes for us in the unfolding repair of the world.

Entering upon the way of love – above all else means accepting an invitation to become transformed into a new way of being, one step at a time – a transformation from timid and grateful children into collaborators with God in the vision of putting the world to rights.

From mere spectators to active participants with Jesus on the way to the cross is a movement through belonging into believing, a risking that moves us from fear into loving and trusting being loved.

This is not a hero’s path. Jesus shows us that it is a very human path. On Good Friday, God shows us the way of love, motivated not by an abhorrence of sin but by what is for God—the impossibility for God of not loving enough.

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.

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Choosing the Right Storyline

All we have are the stories we construct to explain the world both to ourselves and to one another. The creation of narrative is the essential building block for discovering meaning and developing purpose. Any cursory Google or web search will reveal the considerable neuroscientific evidence in support of this assertion. For example – neuroscience researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a narrative after exposure to fiction (Green & Brock, 2000; Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997; Strange & Leung, 1999; Wheeler, Green, & Brock, 1999).

The current profusion of online disinformation and conspiracy theories proves that there is always more than one way to tell a story, and the way you tell it influences beliefs and behaviors. Our awareness of competing stories increases the accuracy of our experience—to use a current slogan—there are facts, and then there are alternative facts. It’s vital to be able to distinguish between restrictive and toxic stories that restrict our capacity for creative responses and expansive stories that encourage creativity in our encounters with the world around us. We develop accuracy of perception, clarity of meaning, and purpose as we select between competing narrative storylines because it’s vital to know which storyline we are participating in.

The power of a storyline rests on its capacity to attract our attention and command our allegiance. We may construct a storyline to make sense of the world as we experience it, but once we do so, that storyline has the power to own us. The question of the current moment is, among competing storylines available to us, which storyline will we choose to believe? From among a bewildering choice of possibilities, which stories will command our allegiance?

With the spread of online information, the question of which stories we allow to shape our perceptions of reality is the question of the moment. We might be surprised to learn that this is not only a modern problem.

Palm Sunday offers a snapshot of competing storylines from Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover and his crucifixion. On Palm Sunday, we witness a clash of competing storylines that are particular to Jesus’ 1st-century setting yet are also universal – timeless.

There is the storyline of sacred violence as the storyline of empire – that is – the unrestrained exercise of power to dominate and subjugate. From Rome to Rule Britannia, from the European legacy of colonial violence to the revival of Putin’s dream of the Russian imperium – not to forget to mention here the legacy and current ugly resurgence of American manifest destiny – the storyline of empire repeats endlessly across time.

Then there is the storyline of populist nationalism with its blood-socked dreams of liberation. On Palm Sunday the waving of palms was a significant echo from Jewish-nationalist collective memory. For some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish revolt against foreign domination, led his victorious partisans into the Temple – which the Hellenist tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes had defiled by placing his statue in the Holy of Holies. Using palm branches, the Maccabean partisans cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement. On entering the sanctuary, they discovered miraculously the last light of the Menorah still burning – an event Jews, today, celebrate in the festival of Hanukkah.

On Palm Sunday, this more recent Jewish storyline of national liberation found a powerful amplification in Israel’s more ancient founding story of liberation—commemorated in the festival of the Passover.

Inhabiting the amplified storyline of national liberation, the crowds ecstatically welcome Jesus into the city. They have yet to discover that they have chosen the wrong storyline. But they will do so – and rather quickly, with the result that they will pivot from exuberance to disillusionment and anger over the course of days. Jesus may be the Messiah, but his messiahship is part of a third storyline—that of the dream of God’s salvation, not of Jewish national liberation.

Casting our mind’s eye over the competing storylines converging on Palm Sunday, we observe that at the same time as Jesus was entering the city from the east, a second triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the west. The Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate, at the head of a militia made up mostly of Samaritan mercenaries, had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

As Prefect, Pilate was a vicious yet relatively low-level regional administrator who reported directly to Vitellius, governor of the Province of Syria. Each year at the Passover, Pilate came up to Jerusalem – forsaking the sea breezes of Caesarea Maritima— Herod the Great’s former capital and now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea.

Pilate loathed and feared Jerusalem’s ancient rabbit warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. He most feared the pilgrim throngs crowding into the city for the Passover, swelling the city’s normal population of between 20-30,000 to over 150,000. The stability of Roman imperial rule required Pilate to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force to forestall any potential for insurrection.

Passover was Israel’s founding story of liberation from slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds hailing Jesus’ arrival were in insurrection mood. Being caught, as they would soon discover, in the wrong Messiah storyline—would have dire consequences for Jesus.

In the week leading to the celebration of Passover, we see with hindsight the lethal intersection of these three competing storylines – of imperial domination and political violence intersecting with populist resistance and longing for national liberation – both confronted by the next installment in the epic storyline of God’s love and vision for the world-through-Israel. This clash of storylines results in a chain of events that takes an unexpected turn – rapidly spiraling out of everyone’s control.

Emotionally and spiritually bloodied by our passage through the snapshots of Holy Week violence, we will eventually arrive at a different story – a new story – a bigger and better story – the unlikely story of Easter. Yet, on Palm Sunday, we’ve some way to travel before arriving there.

Holy Week is when we accompany Jesus on his journey to the cross. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion – surface in identification with Jesus. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal.

As liturgical Christians, we journey with Jesus as a community – each liturgical step along the way. Each snapshot is a prism refracting our own individual suffering and our identification with the overwhelming suffering of the wider world – an experience amplified by events in 2025.

Liturgy transports us together through sacred time. In sacred time, there is no past and no future, only the eternal now. Here, our individuality dissolves as we become participants in the events that engulf Jesus, erasing separation across time and then becoming now. As I’ve mentioned, we are no strangers to the storylines of sacred violence and national populist yearning for a messiah.

Choosing the right story to explain the world to ourselves is crucial. Choosing the wrong story leads only to disillusionment and rage.

Like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior until that is, – he or she no longer is.

We long to do the courageous thing – until that is, the moment when we don’t.

In sacred time, we become participants with Jesus—as if we were part of his band of disciples during this eventful last week. With them, we will share in the breaking of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup. With them, we will accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane, where we, too, will fight sleep to keep watch with him through the night and early hours of Friday morning. With them, we will follow Jesus on the way of his suffering to the cross. For like them – we will long do the courageous thing – until the moment when we we won’t.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

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No Cheap Grace

The parable of the Prodigal Son occurs only in Luke. Among all Jesus’ parables in Luke this one captures the singular tone of Luke’s humanistic presentation of Jesus.

In 2013, in a sermon on this text titled A Punch to the Gut, I drew out the parallels between Luke’s parable of the prodigal and Hogarth’s 18th century series of drawings in  A Rake’s Progress – chronicling a young man’s unravelling from fashionable young buck- about-London-town – newly come into his inheritance – to that of a broken man – destitute and driven mad with syphilis he’s incarcerated in the famous Bedlam hospital where along with the other inmates he becomes an object of curiosity for the fashionable of the day who loved to gape at the inmates as if they were animals in a zoo.

A fun fact is that the first hospice for the mad was dedicated in 1267 as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem at London’s Moorgate. During the reign of Henry VIII, the priory was dissolved and reestablished by royal charter as the Bethlem Royal Hospital – where I served as chaplain for 18 years. In the 17th century, the name Bedlam – a popular derivation of Bethlem became a synonym for chaos and madness and which today remains in common use.

In 2013 I focused on the destuctive narcissism of the young man as psychologically illustrative of the process Luke describes in his parable of the prodigal son. Then I wrote of the younger son seeing other people and situations as simply an extension of his own wants and desires. He cares little for his father, or brother, nor for the women he consorts with. They are simply the momentary extensions of his own wishes- needs, and to him have no life independent of what and who he needs them to fulfill his desires. At the lowest ebb of his life, is it the emergence of sorrow and repentance that reminds him of his father’s love, or is it his narcissistic expectation that his father will once again meet his needs regardless of his actions? Such a myopic psychological analysis seems a rather indulgent luxury when viewed from preaching demands in these more turbulant times.

Today I’m more conscious of the parable’s multilayered complexity. It’s a story as much about the elder son as the younger – as much about the father as either of the sons. Taking Luke’s parable as the parable of a loving father – provides a different starting point for my reflection on the text today.

Who among us does not know the experience of a wayward child? If that is too strong an expression at least many of us will know the pain and concern felt when our children begin to chart courses in life very different from the ones we had anticipated for them – making decisions we would have wished they made differently.

Luke sketches out the scene as Jesus leaves the synagogue where he’s been engaged in a long discussion with the Pharisees following the Shabbat service. As he comes out into the street, he’s mobbed by a crowd who had been loitering with intent to waylay the teacher outside the synagogue doors. In describing them as tax collectors and sinners, Luke is drawing our attention to the fact that these are the ritually unclean, those who would not have been allowed through the synagogue’s doors. Unable to listen to Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees inside, they are eager to hear him nevertheless. The Pharisees, following Jesus out into the street begin to grumble behind him about the shameful way Jesus is mixing with the ritually unclean. Clearly aware of their grumbling he begins to tell everyone this parable: There was a man who had two sons —. .

We can’t know with any certainty what ending the crowd outside the synagogue – both the virtuous pharisees and the ritually unclean expected from this parable. But we do know how subsequent interpretations have sought to reduce it to a rather simplistic morality tale about the wages of sin with strong patriarchal themes of judgment about sex with prostitutes, disobedience to fathers, and the wages of sin contrasted with the importance of duty. The younger son, in following his hedonistic desires, comes -predictably – to a sticky end. When hard times overwhelm him, he is forced to humiliate himself by going back home with his tail between his legs to beg his father’s forgiveness. You can hear the tut tutting down 2000 years of interpretation – be this a lesson for all you rebellious sons.

Both moralistic and psychological interpretations of the text focus on the motivation of the younger son, ignoring both the responses of his elder brother and his father.  What about the elder son’s reactions to his brother’s return? What about the father’s inexplicable pining for his profligate son’s return? Both challenge the traditional worldview of this parable as a morality tale.

This parable offends against the traditions that emphasize the virtues of obedience and duty to strict fatherly rule and the honoring of the firstborn over the younger. It challenges the virtues of blind filial duty. It skirts over being dutiful and hard working on the family estate seems to have bred in the elder son only a deep sense grievance – an envious resentment of his brother and a disparaging contempt for his father. In confronting his father, he refers to his brother not as my brother but as this son of yours – aptly articulating his anger towards both.

The traditional reading of this story is likewise conflicted on how to picture the father – whose indulgent generosity flies in the face of conventional inheritance custom. His willingness to take back his son – failing to hold him to account for his profligate ways smacks of more than a little moral weakness if not an indulgence dangerous to hierarchical moral order.

Reading this story through the filter of patriarchal relations has been one of the two main ways this parable is favoured by tradition.  The other has been to read it through the filter of antisemitism. The father is God. The elder son represents the Jews. and the younger son, the Christians. We can all see where this reading is headed.

But if Jesus were standing in this pulpit, orienting himself to our 21st century mindset he might ask so who do you identify with in this story? This is not simply a question for us as individuals – it has wider social-relation implications. As middle-class folk, dutiful, obedient, hardworking, and schooled in the virtues of delayed gratification, I imagine few of us identify with the headstrong younger son and his deeply narcissistic and self-destructive choices.

Reading the story through the lens of the prodigal son simply confirms our moral judgment of him as selfish and irresponsible – or a psychological interpretation of him as emotionally and psychologically immature. Both comfortably distance us from him and his choices. Reading the story through the lens of the elder son is likely to evoke more sympathy in us. We easily identify with his feelings and reactions – for who among us has not had an experience of being passed over in preference to another. However, it’s when we read this parable through the lens of the father – in other words, hearing the parable through the filter of his feelings and responses that we discover our disapproval of his indulgent, seemingly uncritical and nonjudgmental welcoming of his son’s return. He not only fails to call his son to account but throws caution and financial prudence to the winds – giving completely the wrong signal by appearing to reward bad behavior with a lavish party.

We can’t know how his 1st-century hearers, thronging the road outside the synagogue, expected this story to end. Yet for us today, the parable certainly carries a sting in its tail. We can be clear that Jesus is primarily painting a picture of God as a noncritical and non-judgmental father. God is recklessly generous, failing to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy as recipients of his love. God is a vigilant father whose is by his nature compelled to keep a watchful vigil in the hope of his wayward children’s return. Jesus paints a picture of God as a shockingly indulgent father who treats our return as the occasion for a wild celebration of new life – for his son who was as good as dead and has now come back to life – lost and now found..

The question remains, however, how does this picture of God leave us feeling? We may be happy to imagine ourselves as the recipients of such reckless generosity. But as a model for us to emulate towards anyone who has the power to hurt and disappoint us – we might feel some ambivalence.

Like all of Jesus’ parables, it operates at two levels. In the setting of its telling – the street outside the synagogue – the Pharisees can be depicted as the sincerely religious – men of real integrity and longing to know and love God more. Yet, their ability to be sincere in their spiritual quest is a product of their privileged social and economic status. In debate with Jesus, they are intrigued but remain cautious for being the privileged; they feel that they have much to lose. They want to know what the right path is before they commit to following it. Contrastingly, it’s those whose occupation or lack of one excludes them from among the company of the righteous – who have nothing to lose and who seem open to, and excited by, the invitation implicit in this parable.

We don’t know if the elder son did eventually swallow his hurt pride and join the feast – the parable leaves us with this possibility, for the father’s invitation is open-ended.

Although the parable does not have a clear concluding moral message, it nevertheless has a rub that chafes. The rub is – grace is never free. Oh, it’s offered freely by God and there is no pre-qualification required to receive its invitation. The offer is free, but the acceptance is costly. Identifying with the elder son – what would it cost us to relinquish our resentment and go into the feast? If we can identify with the younger son – what would it cost us to return home, humiliated?

The younger son knows that the grace of the father’s undying love is costly. Both the Pharisees and the tax collectors know that grace is costly. For the Pharisee, it’s costly to give up a presumption of righteousness. For the socially marginalized and religiously excluded, grace comes at the cost of lives of humiliation.

Like the father in this parable, who among us does not know the cost of unconditional, nonjudgmental love? Who among us has not suffered the pain of watching our children chart different life trajectories that either lead to painful and unsuccessful outcomes or hurt us in their rejection of our values and assumptions? We know that, like God’s grace, our love is not free; it exacts its own cost.

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2025

Becoming open to the new – now there’s a counter-cultural proposition if ever there was one. Landscapes change, challenging us to take our values, principles, and beliefs with us as we find our bearings in a new and unfamiliar landscape.

The story of the call of Moses, as we receive it in Exodus 3, is the work of the Deuteronomist scribes of the Babylonian captivity following Jerusalem’s fall and the Temple’s sacking in 586 BC. The seven decades of the Babylonian captivity confronted the Jewish exiles with the challenge of rebuilding a sense of national and religious identity in a dramatically changed landscape. Soul searching for the meaning of events that had befallen them required them to confront the painful question- had God abandoned them in their captivity? In search of an answer, the scribes returned to their stories of national and religious origin. The fruit of this exploration emerged as the book of Exodus. Returning to the stories of national origin, the Jews of the captivity found meaning in present-time events and imagined a new future in restoring national identity.

As we find in Exodus 3, the story of the call of Moses is a reassembling from the fragments of oral folk memory. Many Bible stories – particularly origin stories follow this method. Remembering has less to do with reviving an old tale than with forging a new one.

As we receive the story of the call of Moses, we note the relationship between the time in which the story is set, around 1500 BC, and the circumstances at the later period of composition between 586 and 539 BC. As I’ve just noted, projecting present-time themes back into the past is a tried-and-true method biblical writers used when it was not always safe to be transparent. It’s not only biblical writers who employ this method. Shakespeare’s history plays covering the period from 1399 – 1485 purport to chronicle the rulers and events between these years. Yet, what we see portrayed in his history plays is a picture of Elizabethan and Jacobean society’s politics, entertainment, and social situations, safely projected into the medieval period. In this way, Shakespeare commented on current events without risking losing his head – literally. The purpose of remembering has less to do with reviving an old story than with forging a new one.

The call of Moses is a multilayered story about the struggle to hold onto cultural identity during a period of national catastrophe. There is an overarching narrative linking later issues of exile with an earlier period of captivity. However, within the narrative, events become powerfully instructional. Within the story, we discover the importance of curiosity, the importance of paying attention to peripheral vision, the oscillation between forgetting and remembering, the location of divine encounter as in the place where God meets us, and the struggle to find the courage to respond to God’s call.

Curiosity and the importance of peripheral vision. The story opens with Moses shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep for fresh pasture. Walking along a familiar track, he should have focused on what lay directly ahead of him. However, he becomes distracted when his curiosity is aroused by something he sees flickering in his peripheral vision – glimpsed, as we might say, out of the corner of his eye.

Isn’t this often the way of things. It’s not what appears to be most evident that we need to pay attention to but what we glimpse – caught out of the corner of our eye. Don’t we love those detective stories in which a witness being questioned about the details of the crime remembers something crucial in solving the case? At first, they claim not to have seen anything important. Yet, through painstaking detective prompting – bit by bit, their memory is unlocked, revealing something recorded by their peripheral vision.

Moses detours from his beaten path to better view this fantastic sight of a bush burning without being consumed. As he approaches the burning bush, he hears a voice calling from the heart of the flames: Moses, remove your shoes, for you are about to enter holy ground. He does so and encounters that which will change the trajectory of his life – propelling him onto a new path toward his still-to-emerge life’s purpose.

Forgetting and remembering. Reading between the lines, we are surprised that Moses does not know the god who addressed him. In declaring that he is the God of his fathers, God jogs the collective memory fragments of Moses’ Hebrew identity. Remember, Moses was raised as an Egyptian. The reason he wanders around leading someone else’s sheep is because of the conflict between his Egyptian and Hebrew identities that eventually forces him into exile. Forgetting and remembering – the relationship of the past to the future – become the pivotal themes in the conversation between Moses and God.

God does not waste time after the introductions are over in declaring the purpose he has in mind for Moses. God is asking Moses to return to Egypt to remind the people that the god whom they have forgotten – has not forgotten them. For the hearers of the story in Babylon, this was a reminder that even as they were in danger of forgetting God, God would not forget them.

The place of encounter. Moses is leading his father-in-law’s flock through a landscape described as a place beyond the wilderness. The incurious among us might miss the significance of this description by simply picturing Moses walking through an arid desert landscape – in other words, a wilderness. But he’s not walking through a wilderness- he’s walking into a landscape beyond the wilderness – a description that implies entering a changed landscape – one beyond previous experience – devoid of recognizable signposts.

Moses is tasked with reintroducing God to the Hebrews and, in so doing, conveying a message of hope to them. As with all significant life-changing challenges – Moses is frightened and seeks to avoid the responsibility by playing down his fitness for the task. Even if I take your message to them, why should they believe me? I imagine many of us are similarly daunted by the task of reintroducing the God of the biblical record, the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to a culture held firmly in the grasp of a modern-day Pharaoh.

God’s new name. Up to this point in the story, God has identified as the God of memory – the God of your fathers. In answer to Moses’ understandable hesitancy, God instructs him to give the Hebrews his new name, symbolized by the Hebrew acronym YHWH – translated as I am who I am. God instructs Moses to tell the Hebrews that I am has sent me to you.

The Hebrew letters YHWH shimmer with ambiguity. The ambiguity of meaning is an outstanding characteristic of Hebrew, wholly lost in English translation. The Hebrew I am who I am, suggests a shimmering oscillation between I am who I have been, and I am who I will be.  A God identified with memory becomes a God of future possibility.  

The God of their fathers resurfaces into Hebrew consciousness – not as a God of distant memory but henceforth as Yahweh, a God of future hope and promise – a God whom they may have forgotten -but who has not forgotten them and who is inviting them into a changed landscape – into a place beyond the wilderness – a place of new beginning replacing the mourning for the past.

Today, rather like the Hebrews in Egypt and the Jews in Babylon, we find ourselves in a culture in which God, as revealed in the biblical record, has likewise become forgotten. Most Americans no longer share a common religious knowledge, allowing us to access a shared memory of God. The younger the generation, the worse it becomes. Outright rejection accompanies a general ignorance regarding the biblical stories through which God introduced God-self to former generations.

You might object that there is a vocal minority that loudly proclaims divinely mediated knowledge of God. However, this god is not recognizable as the God of Moses. The god of popular American Christian Nationalism is a god who no longer hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed, the voice of the stranger and the dispossessed, the plight of the victims of a cruel hatred for the LGBTQ+ community. This god is vociferously celebrated for his deafness, along with his whiteness and his maleness.

Today, we painfully awaken to the experience of finding ourselves in a changed landscape. Will we reach a place beyond the wilderness where new connections forge new possibilities to be grasped?

Receiving this story in 2025, we can’t avoid the question: are we willing to take our values, principles, and beliefs into a changed landscape – into an encounter with a God of future possibility? Or will we continue to mourn the loss of previous certainties – pretending that we don’t notice things have changed? In a changed landscape – a place beyond the wilderness God reintroduces God-self to us. No longer a God of fading or even of forgotten memory – but a God of vibrant present-time hope and future possibility – calling us to slough off the dead shell of yesterday and begin to live the life to which we are called. But this requires fortitude to resist being coopted into pharaoh’s camp. It will require finding the courage to confront a culture that seeks to make one man God so that all men become slaves. My goodness, if we do, then who might we become?

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It’s the Coming Down that Matters

Looking at the gospel reading from Luke chapter 9, you will see that we are given two options. The first is to read only verses 28-36. Here, we hear the story of Jesus taking Peter and John on a mountain climb. On reaching the summit, Jesus becomes transfigured – his face shining with intense illumination and his clothes glowing with a dazzling whiteness. We note the echo of Moses’ experience on the mountaintop of Sinai reported in the OT lesson from Exodus 34.

Between verses 28- 36, we learn that the disciples gaze amazed yet fearfully at Jesus, speaking with Moses and Elijah – discussing Jesus’ journey to his death in Jerusalem.

The last Sunday after Epiphany is not the celebration of the feast of the Transfiguration – which takes place on August 6th. Today, we simply hear the story of Jesus and the disciples’ transfiguration experience as the transition story that marks the movement from Epiphany into Lent.

Epiphany means showing – a peeling away the layers of appearance to reveal the underlying true nature of things. Epiphany season begins on January 6th with the event known as The Epiphany – recalling the visit of the Magi to the infant Christ Child – signaling the non-Jewish world’s recognition of Jesus as the promised one foretold by Israel’s prophets. A second epiphany with a small e occurs a week later when we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus – during which the voice from heaven reveals Jesus as God’s openly acknowledged son. After his baptism, the clouds part as the heavens open to herald God’s proclamation of Jesus’ divine sonship. During Jesus’ transfiguration experience, once again, we hear the voice of God repeating the earlier proclamation of Jesus’ sonship – but in contrast to the clouds parting and the heavens opening, this time the voice sounds from within the density of a dark cloud descending to envelop the mountain summit.

The story of the Transfiguration functions as a final epiphany with a small e – in this case, a piercing of the layers of appearance exposing the underlying hidden truth of Jesus’ identity as a preparation for his fateful journey to Jerusalem. The story also functions as a literary device, marking the halfway point in the gospel narratives between Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and his journey to Jerusalem – his death and resurrection. We can picture the Galilee ministry progressing towards an epiphany on the mountaintop. Likewise, we can picture the trip to Jerusalem beginning with the descent from the mountain – setting out on the hard road through Lent to the destination of the cross before the final epiphany of his resurrection.

The story of the Transfiguration operates symbolically similarly to when Dr Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed I have been to the mountain top, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. No one ever thought he was claiming to have climbed a mountain to describe the view on the other side. They understood his use of the mountaintop as a symbol with deep theological and biblical resonance. Likewise, for the synoptic gospel writers – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – the story of the Transfiguration is loaded with theological and biblical resonance, linking the beginning of the Jesus story with its ultimate ending – from birth through death to resurrection.  

So far, so good. But suppose we continue to read beyond verses 36 to 43. In that case, we enter into a bracketed section of text – bracketed to indicate that in the mind of the Lectionary compilers, these verses are optional. The bracketing might suggest a desire to keep the gospel reading short. But it also strikes me that the bracketing of verses 37-43 not only leaves the story incomplete but also might indicate how much more comfortable we are with experiences of transcendence than those of immanence.

Mountaintop experience symbolizes much hankered after peak experience – the spiritual high – the blissful experience. In contrast, the journey down shows Jesus reentering the noise and chaos – the tension, the messiness of the world. The arguing and recrimination in the scene that greets him at the bottom of the mountain is emblematic of our life experience when we come down from the highs of peak experience. Transitory bliss is soon dissipated amidst the more familiar feelings of anger, frustration, exasperation, and disappointment. Jesus does not hold back in expressing all these feelings in the face of human propensities and pretensions as he cries You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?

Today’s gospel marks our transition from Epiphany to Lent. Figuratively, we descend from Epiphany’s heights to accompany Jesus on the rugged and stony road through Lent that will lead us to Jerusalem and beyond. This year, we hear the readings for the last Sunday before Lent sounding within the unique context of the present time in which we can’t ignore the fact that today, we revisit the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain in the context of profound shock at the speed with which the world as we have come to know it seems to be coming apart at the seams.

We are sick at heart –aching with concern for the thousands of legal refugees now stranded across the globe at ports of debarkation for the US –  clutching their State Department permissions to enter the US now seemingly not worth the paper they were written on. Our concern encompasses the legal refugees newly arrived in the US whose resettlement programs have now been defunded. Our hearts are full of fear for the families of undocumented immigrants – families where parents and children at the beginning of each day wonder if they will still be together at day’s end. 

We seethe with rage at the callous indifference shown to thousands of faithful civil servants whose employment has been summarily terminated by the click of the send button.

We blanch with shame as America insidiously affirms Russian aggression before the General Assembly of the United Nations. We watch in fascinated horror as foreign leaders are welcomed, unaware that the Oval Office has now been transformed into the set of The Apprentice. Bravo to President Zelensky, who, unlike the ritual humiliation of Jordan’s King Abdullah two weeks ago, refused to play the game and pretend he didn’t recognize that the subtle art of diplomacy is now replaced by the crude art of the deal. 

Our faith in sound government is further corroded by a deepening cynicism as we witness once more a cowered Congress embarking on swinging budget cuts – not to put a dent in the national debt but to give wiggle room for a trillion dollars in tax giveaways to the 1%.

But lest I be accused of laying blame at others’ doors, as the blame game goes around and around, there is enough blame to crown all our heads with shame. Dietrich Bonhoeffer –our go-to prophet for our age – speaking to his fellow pastor-resisters during Christmas 1942 pulls us up short, reminding us of our failings. To paraphrase him:  we stand in grave danger lest we become even more the silent witnesses of evil deeds. We stand in peril of further perfecting our defense skills, relying on our learning in the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. If we fail to protest in the face of a deluge of unbearable events, we will become more worn down – become – as if it were possible – even more cynical – so that Bonhoeffer’s question – Are we still of any use, becomes the question for our age.

Kristopher Norris, Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington DC, in the Baptist Global News wrote: With family separations at the border, automatic detentions, dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric from our highest office and authoritarian misappropriations of scripture from our highest attorney, many churches and Christian leaders have remained silent witnesses. Three-fourths of white evangelicals continue to support these policies. Other churches and Christian leaders have responded with appropriate outrage. We’ve said this is not who we are — as Americans or as Christians. But Bonhoeffer’s words should compel us to take a deeper look at ourselves, at our history, and acknowledge that this is not true…. this is who we are as Americans ….. this is who we are as Christians ….. for this – citing the legacy of white Christian Nationalism is our collective history.

On Ash Wednesday, we will hear the Church’s invitation to the observance of a holy Lent. Among the traditional disciplines – the practices of discipleship – repentance is named as the chief way to make a right beginning. It is not only the best way to make a proper beginning, but it will remain the only way we will stay self-reflective and course for Jerusalem.

Repentance is the mark of our mortal nature, and repentance must become our byword as we accompany Jesus through the arid landscape of Lent, navigating the stony path to Jerusalem. In this life, it’s not what happens on the mountaintop that shapes us but how we conduct ourselves on the downward journey into the inevitable confrontation with the challenges of life in the world ruled by the demons of our age.

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An Unsatisfying Teaching

It’s Friday morning, a sunny but still bitterly cold morning. From my desk, I look out on the panorama of the houses and streets that, from North Main Street, climb College Hill to its apex crowned by the impressive verdigris dome of the Christian Science Church. I always think this an odd choice of architecture for a Christian Science church, yet like a great classical cathedral its dome dominates the horizon.

On this particular Friday morning, I am struggling to clear my head of the fog of the head cold – currently doing the rounds – that has laid me low since the previous Sunday. I’m daydreaming—casting around for inspiration to take me into a spiritual riff on the lectionary texts for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany. This Friday morning feeling is familiar – the tension between despair at the task lying before me and a curiosity that stimulates my imagination sooner or later will provide the hook for my fresh engagement with the texts for the day.

Genesis 45 and Luke 6 address the tension between the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you and the law of retaliation do unto others as they have done unto you. A distinction lies in the inclusion or absence of four words that, insignificant in themselves, have the power to determine the course towards the promise of liberation from or the endless repetition of cycles of victimization and retaliation in individual and wider social relations.  

From general observation, we can often see themes connecting the OT and the Gospel texts, which alert us to the particularity of God’s timely invitation. Between OT story and Gospel teaching, we find old themes reemphasized and given new impetus.

The experience of victimization – whether real or imagined – fosters the illusion that retaliation will provide satisfaction for past injury. This is the theme that the story of Joseph and his brothers and the teaching of Jesus in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is timely – speaking into the dilemmas of our current time.

Joseph becomes an exemplar of the power of love – interpreted as the desire for reconciliation – to triumph over the impulse for retaliation. Joseph has every reason to hate his brothers for what they did to him. His brothers have every reason to fear his desire for revenge. Yet, having moved beyond his experience of being the victim allows Joseph to choose reconciliation over retaliation – thus breaking out of the repetitive cycle of victimization and retaliation.

Yet the story of Joseph and his brothers is nevertheless an ironic tale. At the heart of this story lies the irony that it is harder to be forgiven than punished for wrongdoing. The brothers are astonished and relieved having escaped Joseph’s retaliation. But this is not enough to free them from their expectation of retaliation – if not now, then later. Although they are seemingly forgiven, they are still left with the memory of having only narrowly avoided murdering their brother by selling him into slavery and deceiving their father with the lie of Joseph’s death in the claws and teeth of a lion. Until the end of the story, they remain in the grip of their expectation that revenge is the only response open to the victim. Proof that being the recipient of mercy -is, as Proverbs 25 says- akin to having hot coals poured over the head.

Jesus asks us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. He encourages us to turn the other cheek and to be self-sacrificial in our generosity – even at the risk of personal cost. He asks these things of us not because it’s the nice Christian thing to do – not to score some secret oneupmanship victory. Jesus is not exhorting us to the practice of a pious masochism that sentimentalizes turn the other cheek as the ultimate expression of passivity. He is showing us that this is the only way to step out of the cycle of victimization and retaliatory violence.

James Breech, in The Silence of Jesus, writes:

Jesus says, ‘…do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’ And watch what happens. This is a recipe for destroying the little bundle of lies about myself and my society that came into existence the moment my tribe and I found somebody to hate. Following this injunction is not just a nice thing to do. It’s a matter of destroying the whole system of mystification which has been the womb in which [we’ve] lived and moved and had [our] social existence.

Love your enemies is the recipe for destroying the whole system of mystification – by which is meant the hatred of the other that forms the womb in which, to quote St Augustine, we live and move and have our being – that is, the culture of victimhood and retribution that permeates our social existence.

These days, many of us witnessing a severe attack on the Constitutional balance of power and the seemingly unstoppable descent into transactional authoritarianism with alarm and distress are asking the question, what does resistance look like? The unpalatable answer – unpalatable because it feels so unsatisfactory and so ineffectual- is Christian resistance. It means resistance shaped by Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies as the only way of breaking the cycle of victimization and retaliation – by which hatred of the other forms the womb in which we live and move and have our being.

Jesus calls us to follow him – to live lives well lived as the response to living under the weight of a coercive regime. Jesus calls us to embrace the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people – as opposed to fantasizing grand schemes of formal political action. He calls us to the resistance of the heart – the refusal to be coopted by feelings of powerlessness into responses of passivity and compliance. Likewise, he calls us to turn away from the path of countering violence with violence. In addition to legitimate steps of political and legal protest, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as a reminder that –there are no small acts of resistance; any act by anyone has the potential of reverberating – of being absorbed and replicated, leading to meaningful change (Delia Popescu writing about Vaclav Havel the great Czech dissident and later President of a post-Communist Czechoslovakia).

Translated into our current political context, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as the primary form of effective resistance, requiring us to undergo a transformation of the human heart. This alone breaks the cycle of victimization and retaliation – the cycle of repetitive violence that has captured our social consciousness. In effect, when we cease seeing ourselves as victims, we not only take back our power but also break the grip that the desire for retaliation holds in our hearts.

At the deepest level, Jesus is asking us to give up being afraid – to give up seeing ourselves as helpless victims and, in the words of the late John O’Donohue, to have the courage today to live the life that we would love and to waste our hearts on fear no more (John O’Donohue, Morning Offering).

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Blessings & Curses

In an age when calls to make Christendom great again are growing deafening we need the courage to risk new kinds of thinking—about ourselves, our roots, our communities, and our obligations; about God’s relationship with us and our relationships with each other. This is a kind of risky thinking – so writes Mac Loftin in his review of a new translation of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots in the recent edition of The Christian Century. In 1942, General de Gaulle tasked Weil to write a report on how France could be rebuilt after liberation from German occupation. Weil jettisons the idea of universal human rights in favor of universal human obligations – because recognizing another’s rights does not necessarily change how we treat them.  

Taking my English Cocker Spaniel, Mable Rose out at the crack of dawn – living on Exchange St downtown I sometimes witness the trickle of seemingly unhoused persons trudging from the direction of Kennedy Plaza towards the railway station. I’m saddened by the sight of obvious misery. I think – someone should do something!—before going back inside the warmth and security of my building. Weil’s treatise shifts the perspective from an infringement of the universal human rights of the unhoused to my obligation toward them. Every time I lament their plight before moving on, I fail an absolute and unshirkable obligation.

The Beatitudes – are one of Jesus’ most loved, yet also one of the most misunderstood and argued-over of his teachings. The Beatitudes are in Matthew part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But in Luke, they are delivered as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. This difference in location has a greater significance than a mere question of topography. Playing on Simone Weil’s distinction between rights and obligations is it possible to frame the difference between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of this story as one akin to the difference between a statement of potential rights and a demonstration of present-time obligations?

In Matt. 5:1 we find Jesus retreating from the huge crowds who had flocked to hear him. Climbing a hillside he leads his disciples to a quiet place, where he begins to teach them. In seclusion on the mountaintop Jesus begins Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Jesus is weaving a beautiful vision of rights and ultimate rewards.

In Luke 6:17: we find Jesus – not retreating up a mountain but coming down from one to stand in the middle of a plain. He stands in the middle of a huge crowd who have come from all over Judea and Jerusalem, even from the seaside towns of Tyre and Sidon seeking to be cured of their ailments. It must have been pandemonium -everyone trying to touch Jesus – healing energy surging from him with every bodily contact. Amid the throng pressing in on him Jesus proclaims Blessed are you who are poor now, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Instead of a vision of rights and ultimate rewards, Jesus is asking for present-time action within a set of mutual obligations.

Matthew’s Jesus uses the third person form of address to communicate an impersonal objective generality—blessed are they—whereas Luke’s Jesus communicates with the directness of the second person form. He’s not speaking in general; he is talking specifically to you and me.

In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, we see Jesus emerging as the new improved Moses, delivering his new model Torah from the mountaintop only to those who constitute the new and improved community of Israel. Whereas Luke’s depiction of this scene in the Sermon on the Plain, shows Jesus emerging as a cosmopolitan healer with a message proclaimed not in the serenity of the mountaintop to a chosen few but to anyone who cares to listen amidst the chaos and din of the world.

Matthew pictures Jesus talking to the in-crowd, his band of trusty disciples – the selected ones who are privy to the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. Luke’s picture is of Jesus talking to anyone who will listen- an approach that assumes that none of us can be included in the kingdom while any one of us remains outside. The message of the kingdom is far from being a secret – it’s laid bare before the public gaze. Luke’s Jesus, having broken out of the straitjacket of Jewish expectation comes down from the lofty isolation of the mountaintop to mix it up with all in sundry. Luke’s Jesus is shockingly intimate with the desperate and seething throng of humanity serging around him. Luke’s Jesus is more than promising a right to be healed – he is acting upon his obligation to heal them. For Luke, the Beatitudes’ are more than rights to an inheritance in heaven. They are obligations to be fulfilled through present-time action.

Not for the first time do we have to straddle the tensions between Matthew’s and Luke’s presentation of Jesus. We must balance Matthew’s emphasis on an inheritance of future fulfillment of kingdom promises through perseverance and courageous faithfulness in the face of present-time suffering with Luke’s emphasis on the kingdom – not as a future inheritance but as a lived reality in the here and now.

Present-time reality is messy. There are forces and conspiracies of power that oppose the values and frustrate the expectations of the Kingdom. Therefore, living the Kingdom in the here and now involves not only promises of future blessings but also naming and calling out the sources of opposition – cursings alongside blessings. Luke’s Jesus shouts out a stinging rebuke to those who through the self-protective interests of wealth and power oppose the implementation of the Kingdom’s values and expectations in the here and now. Jesus is an uncomfortable preacher who blesses those the world curses and curses those the world blesses.

Sunday’s Coming Premium is The Christian Century’s paid-subscription email newsletter—which week-by-week draws from the Century’s archives articles related to the week’s lectionary texts. I’ve already noted Mac Loftin’s review of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots appearing in this past week’s edition.

In this past week’s Sunday’s Coming Premium newsletter, the editor cites the writer Christopher Morse who in Not Every Spirit demonstrates how the early Christians were persecuted not for what they believed (Jesus Christ is Lord) but for what they refused to believe (Caesar is Lord). Ralph Wood is also cited for pointing out that in the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany, every credimus, “We believe . . .,” is followed by a damnatis, “We reject . .” When it came time for the rest of the German church to say “Nein!” it had lost the theological means to know there was even something about the world worth rejecting, as well as lost the courage to say “No!” Taken out of historical context, this is a powerful message that should resonate within contemporary American Christianity – lest we too lose the theological means to know there is something about the world that needs rejecting and grasp the courage to echo Jesus’ judgment – woe to you who count yourself powerful in this world and brazenly set yourself against the implementation of the values and expectations of the Kingdom’s coming!

Luke’s is a theological message that carries a powerful political punch – confronting every aspect of a status quo where environmental, economic, and social injustice continues to be denied and where the self-satisfied pride of the rich and the powerful is celebrated; where living the Kingdom’s expectation for greater social and racial inclusion as a present imperative for the Christian life is dismissed as mere wokeness. The Beatitudes – whether seen as universal human rights or present-time obligations- demand a response which if heard, should make us decidedly squirmy.

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