While even his closest associates would lean towards dismissing the people to fend for themselves, [Jesus] invites the community of the wilderness into a divine economy of care. Sharing, as a physical manifestation of that care, requires a suspension of the belief that scarcity is the only reality available in the moment of want.
The reign of God may be hidden, but it invites participants to risk much—even everything, to know the joy and treasure inherent in this alternative way of life in the world.
Remembering that our current lives are being lived during the time of the kingdom allows us the humility to see each individual moment as being equally beautiful, equally meaningful, and equally essential to prepare for the harvest.
Moral imagination, standing up even when afraid, is required to provide empathetic welcome to prophets, righteous people, and “these little ones.”
Insiders and those most similar are invited into the movement first, and then, if meaningful and urgent enough to others expands to those beyond the insiders. The expansion of God’s Realm in Matthew is built slow and steady, an example we have much to learn from.
Jesus presents himself as a physician, and offers one of his most programmatic statements of ethics. The sick need a doctor, not the healthy. Why then does church seem designed for the already well?
Palm Sunday confronts every community that confesses Christ. The king who enters Jerusalem does not resemble the rulers people had learned to recognize. He does not arrive with armies or weapons. Instead, he embodies a kingdom grounded in humility, service, and reconciliation.
Jesus’ call to a ‘let-it-be righteousness,’ awash in basileia imperatives, upends despotic designs. Resistant to rule-following, a let-it-be righteousness confounds and dismantles the 3 P’s of oppressive regimes: propriety, purity, and piety.
The joy of Christmas is always mixed up with the grief of the world’s suffering. One need only look today at the very town the magi came to visit.
All human beings (including me) are capable of dehumanizing others. Moreover, all dehumanizers (including Jesus) can change their minds.
Perhaps the tension between honest reading and creative liberatory “misinterpretation” should not be solved at all but rather retained as an unsettling force in our work.