Topic: Jesus

In the encounter with Jesus, our self-delusion and our scapegoating are painfully exposed, but with the possibility of forgiveness and freedom.

The coming Christ will continually confound our expectations, no matter how well informed or righteous they may be.

Jesus acted out the parables that he was telling in his encounters with people, expressing the nature of God who seeks after us and rejoices in our being found and restored. God invites us to be people like that.

The world will try to domesticate the gospel and get it to reinforce the world’s status quo and moral codes, but as people identified with Christ on the cross, we live the radical (and offensive) life of the new creation.

Jesus’s resurrection was a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.

In the face of powerful evil, our choice like Jesus’s choice is between the natural human instincts of flight or fight, and the third way of obedience to God.

It is always a shock to realise just who Jesus is and what he’s on about.

Religious ritual and ethical living are both bound up together in the journey of following Jesus into the Realm of God.

Making the Church in the incarnate body of Christ is costly for God, and both challenging and salvific for us.

If we can lose ourselves in the worship of Christ, then Christ will come to fill our emptied egos with his own self which now dances in the freedom of God.

God has promised that if we stay connected to him, then he will give us the energy and the love to go out from our comfort-zones into the alien territory of those who need God’s love most of all.

The message that salvation is exclusively in the hands of the risen Christ may be unfashionable, but it is the only message of salvation we have to offer.