Topic: Forgiveness

Philip asked Jesus to show him God. The answer dismantles centuries of angry-God theology — and exposes the retributive impulse hiding in all of us.

When the executed one comes back, everyone expects retribution. The shock of resurrection is that he doesn’t.

Salvation – reconciliation with God and with one another – is relational rather than transactional, and it begins with a willingness to see, listen and learn.

True forgiveness, which we encounter most fully in the risen Christ, does not gloss over the past but revisits it fully and carefully that we may be fully set free from it.

If you set yourself against the other, you also cut yourself off from the Father who loves you both. You diminish yourself, cut off the other, and break the Father’s heart.

The call to love our enemies is not a new law to slave at, but a call into a culture of love so wild and free and strong that no one can hate it out of us.

The forgiveness we experience in the risen Christ is dauntingly radical and we are called to share it.

God’s offer of unlimited forgiveness creates a new world in which we are free to stop judging one another and turning on one another and spiralling into violence and hatred.

Jesus’s parables always shock us, and few things shock us more than the outrageous graciousness that God shows us and calls for from us.

Our unwitting abusive treatment of the Royal family is a symptom of our entanglement in systemic persecution.

In Christ, God has made an agreement with us, offering us everything and demanding nothing, but if we offer nothing we will be at risk of squandering it all.

All that matters about God, about sin and forgiveness, and about living with integrity and freedom, flows from the human encounter with the crucified and risen Jesus.