Yet this “good news” – profoundly strange, even apparently morbid – promises that, in relinquishing our supereminent concern for the self, pursuing instead the way of peace and justice, we become so free that even a violent end may be an expression of an ultimately joyful reception of the gift of life – that is, it may be the way to save a life.
A political theology of the transfiguration of Jesus has to expose and transgress the elevation of whiteness as divine, as a norm and as something superior to multi-coloured local expressions of faith. It also calls us to celebrate the mystery of transfiguration as trans-figuration of the body ethic of Jesus and of all humanity.
Jesus’ saying about the destruction of the temple gives us a way to view human structures as the powers they are but also as provisional—as all human things are.
Is wealth the opposite of Christianity? Is profit antithetical to the kin-dom of God? A look into Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli’s accounting process – now called reconciliation accounting – reveals that despite Jesus’ words, the practice of Christians in the Western world has emphatically answered: no, they get along just fine. It is high time for a Christianity, guided by Mark 10:17–31, that is unreconciled with wealth.
To be personally acquainted with disownment and the discourse of death—simultaneously, from divergent communities—and still desire to be “servant of all” is, perhaps, one way to journey through death on the Way. Nevertheless, Jesus’ teaching to love neighbor and enemy is both beautiful and horrible, not unlike the Christ’s foretelling of his death on the way to resurrection.
The God we meet in Amos and John demands righteousness, solidarity and justice as the foundations of faithful living. Neutrality scuppers justice. When we drift away from God, our fellow human beings and the life-giving environment, prophetic truth-telling tempered with an imagination for a different world becomes a necessity.