Topic: Identity

When greed and fear demand that we give our attention to money, Jesus calls us to reclaim the image of God within us, and offer ourselves to God.

With Jesus as our pattern, we find a new identity in our uncompromising allegiance to God’s ways.

When we know ourselves as known by God, the demonic power of violent naming is broken and new life dawns.

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

God has given us a new identity and a new allegiance in his kingdom, and our loyalty is now to truth and compassion regardless of their consequences for the interests of any other communities or kingdoms.

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.

A fortified inner self not only enables a person to offer love properly but to receive love properly, even from God, to give without strings, to receive without suspicion.

In baptism we are joined to Christ and we now live as he leads, and celebrate the freedom of others to do so also.

The Trinitarian stories resemble the dreaming of Australia’s Aborigines, for both imagine the divine as a community of being in which we are invited to participate, and so find our true being.

Praise and prayer enable us to find our true identify in Christ, and it is as we find out who we are that we find our true strength.

There is an illuminating contrast between the response of the pagan magi and the response of the biblical scholars, and between the kingship of Jesus and the kingship of Herod.