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.
The third slave, as truth-teller and whistle-blower, validates what Jesus’ listeners know about their reality. They know that the deck is stacked against them, if they choose to buck the system.
Christian nationalism is a form of superstition. It is superstitious because, instead of appealing to the God of all nations, it appeals to a culturally fabricated God for cultural privilege, power, and benefits.
Jesus’ parable identifies chosenness in those who resist, dissent, protest and refuse the invitations of the empire.
If we are willing to listen to those standing around without work, however, a new possibility emerges. Why are they standing around without work? “Because no one has hired us,” they reply (Matthew 20:7). They aren’t lazy, they’re desperate enough to stand around all day waiting for work. The laborers are many; the jobs are few.