Book: Matthew

As we journey with and into God, we all prepare carefully, travel persistently, seek advice, approach the sacred with humility, and discern the way forward.

Jesus calls us to a new world in which the lives of nations revolve around bringing the previously marginalised to the centre of our national way of being. Nations that fail to do that collapse into self-destruction.

While many have a passive-aggressive relationship with God, the gospel gives us a vision of God that liberates us to live freely, expansively and joyously.

We we allow God’s word to work in us, it lifts the burden of oppressive teaching from us.

Living the beatitudes is tough and dangerous, and we will need the inspiration and company of the saints, before us and beside us, if we are going to make it.

If we keep imitating one another, paying back violence with vengeance, the world will be consumed in an escalating fury, but Jesus rescues us and gives us a life-giving example to follow.

In order to recognise and cooperate with what God is doing, we often need to recognise and see past the assumptions that come with our own privilege.

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.

Our true identity is only found when we discover that it is not about us, but that we are only truly anyone in relation to the God who is everything, and who is not the opposite of anything.

We respond to Jesus in different ways at different times, because we are not fully integrated in ourselves, but God loves us in all our fragmented parts.

Looking for emerging patterns can help us (and Jesus?) recognise the ways that God is opening new pathways of grace and inclusion.

Jesus never stops crossing the menacing water to come to where we are, saying: “Take courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.”