Sometimes, there are no cosmic answers to the cosmic questions around us. Jesus demonstrates that the answer to that question, ‘who are you?’ can only be lived out in relationality to the divine one moment, one temptation at a time.
The transfiguration stories in scripture, and their mountains, are not places of answers. They are places of raw honesty about our own limits. They are places where words give way to water that flows where it will, to sustain life. They are places of confronting grief and loss. They are places of silence. And these mountains are places to wonder at the mystery of the God who created us to need each other and this earth.
Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount unsettles many biblicist ways of understanding Scripture. It may even be better to move from speaking of ‘the Scriptures’ as a noun, to speaking of ‘Scripturing’ as a verb.
Embodying the best of the prophetic tradition, the text encourages us to consider that religion, in fact, does have functions: liberation, feeding the hungry, inviting vulnerable strangers into our homes, and undoing injustice.
Any power we might feel we gain through the power over dynamic is illusory and fleeting, and will always eventually result in our death/defeat, with our illusions of power lying dead around us.
This week’s lectionary represents the challenges of leadership, and the passing of more than one torch. The arc that emerges is one of hope and promise, but also one of struggle and discernment concerning leadership.
John the Baptist paves the way for a new ecclesiological model that pushes the church beyond a reproductive model of mission insistent on its own futurity. Embracing an ecclesiological ‘death drive’ can open doors to see the unexpected God-over-there within the present.
Everyday life gives us ample opportunity to fulfill all righteousness, at least as far as the gods of global capital are concerned. Building credit, contributing to a 401K plan, purchasing ordinary goods produced through an extraordinary supply chain, we participate in the enchanted world of mammon, in which money defies space and time to make and remake a world that bears its image. But in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus inhabits a different kind of story about God and the world, about empire and capital.
In displaying its cosmic vision, Psalm 8 invites its readers to participate, in some limited way, in the divine perspective that exceeds our own, in which anthropocentric fantasies are judged and redefined.
When we work towards the eradication of structures that perpetuate poverty in our communities, those that divide us, systems that perpetuate classism or any form of caste system, we each become the light that others see around them. This is also how we embody the glory of God as was experienced by the shepherds in the Lukan narrative.
Jesus is not Joseph’s biological son. Matthew starts his genealogy in the usual patriarchal way, but Jesus does not continue this line. Does this not mean freedom from the patriarchal lineage?