The story of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the foundational memory of Christianity. It is a story that not only tells of God’s power over death and the fragility of the empire’s power over life, but also demands that all perspectives be heard, in a grand cacophony of voices, all in common song, singing of the impossible mystery: Jesus is risen, indeed.
The devil sought to divert Jesus from his mission in three different ways. Walking Christ’s cruciform way, we face the same temptations.
The transfiguration reveals the implicit grammar of Jesus’ politics and political identity. This identity did not require a retreat to heaven, but confrontation and crucifixion in Jerusalem.
Luke makes it clear that it is God, and God alone, who can best align our lives and realities, to make us whole and healthy, and to give us a life worth living, a life most “human.”
Where do we place ourselves in these narratives? What is our posture toward the prophets among us? Are we the prophetic children, the parents who tentatively support yet fear their calling, or the status quo that they oppose?
The Mary that we discover in Luke’s gospel may not be the sentimentalized and domesticated Mary of the Christian imagination.
John the Baptist offers a way for us to rethink Advent, suggesting that the advent of the kingdom demands the advent of justice.
The message of John the Baptist challenges our complacency about sin, an attitude that pervades and perverts our entire life as a society.
The nearness of God inspires communities to work for justice, for the Son of Man as a co-pilgrim participates in the struggles of the creation.
Resurrection is at work among and recognized by those at the periphery long before those in the center.
The story of the sign given to the shepherds—the Child wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger—both recalls and anticipates other scriptural events in significant yet surprising ways. It also reminds us of our vocation, as those who must declare the good news of the sign of Christ to the shepherds of our age.
The Magnificat is a song of divine disruption, the song of God’s revolution.