Topic: Jesus

Jesus says to each one of us “I am the new wine. Feed on me”.

We remain blind to much of what Jesus would have us see until we allow him to open our eyes to see through the eyes of others.

Taking up your cross is about a willingness to pay the price of following Jesus and living out your baptism. It is not a generalised stoicism.

God created everything and destined everything to be part of the one glorious story of God’s love and grace, and through Jesus, God draws us back into the story.

When we encounter Jesus, we are seeing the truth about God and the truth about life as it is meant to be lived. To embrace that truth will put us at odds with the world, but on the pathway to fullness of life.

The risen Christ and his word are often revealed in the words and actions of a stranger. Sometimes we are called to welcome and heed the stranger; and sometimes we are called to be the faithful stranger to others.

Faith in the risen Christ is always a physical thing, experienced and expressed in physical ways.

Jesus’s unique priesthood ensures that he is able to help us, and his solidarity with us in suffering ensures that he will help us.

God’s love for us is so great that God will do anything to give us a way out of the self-condemnation and self-destruction of continuing to live in conformity with the world’s ways.

Jesus is angered by our trivialising of religion that inoculates us against the claims of a holy God, and calls us to clean out the crassness and commercialism and approach God on God’s terms.

When we glimpse the fullness of what could be, we are called to the tough work of bridging the gap between here and there.

God is with us to comfort and revive us in the face of horror, but also to challenge us to turn things around.