Topic: Liberation

Every coin you are holding already belongs to God: every bitterness, every hurt, every disappointment. Do not hold a single one back.

Jesus wants to lift us beyond the deadening conformity that seeks to silence us and confine us to a stunted life.

We have been adopted as the children of a king who does not withhold his love until we comply, who does not ask us to sing for our supper, who does not use us or abuse us, but longs to bind up our wounds.

Despite our often minimal vision for ourselves, and our feeling of not being important to God, Jesus Christ is committed to bringing us to the fullness of life and wholeness.

When we approach God’s way of life and the Sabbath not as punishment, but as gift, the experience becomes a chance to rest from work and from striving; and to allow space for God through contemplation and re-creation and play.

Jesus calls us to turn away from pathways of judgement and condemnation and to follow him on the harder path of love and new life.

Jesus urges us to take stock, to recognise the sicknesses which warp us and the demons which colonise our hearts and our minds, to renounce them so that we become free to minister to one another, and to proclaim the good news in our words and our lives.

There are many stories in the Bible that can appear to portray God as involved in terrorist acts, but Jesus invites us to read them in new ways.

What would happen if violence were met with bread, with blankets, with hospitals, with forgiveness of debts?

Whether we have been the oppressor or the oppressed or both, we all have a role in God’s work against violence and exploitation; we can all participate in God’s passion for justice.

Trying to establish our own righteousness burdens us with divisiveness and hostility, but Jesus offers us rest and freedom.

God and religion misunderstood can be the cause of hostility, division and violence, but the God made known to us in Jesus is a God of grace who generously gives us life, freedom and reconciliation.