Book: Mark

Satan casts out satan all the time in our divisive attempts to protect ourselves by demonising and expelling others.

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.

Lent is a time to walk knowingly into the wilderness, to face the Accuser and the wild beasts that emerge when we live out our identity as God’s children.

Expecting God to always appear as an exalted triumphant  victor blinds us to the reality of God’s glory which is made known in suffering, self-sacrificial love.

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.

Jesus calls us to model a pattern of love and generous inclusion, and to avoid the demonic temptations of exclusion and pride.

Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Lord, that already and not-yet event for which people have lived and worked and prayed for millennia.

Jesus calls us to courageously follow him through a world of apparently apocalyptic violence towards the advent of hope and peace.

God wants love rather than sacrifice, but in a fallen world love that is genuine will often be sacrificial.

In the sacraments, Jesus constantly calls us to follow him in giving up conventional notions of honour and offer ourselves for the life of the world.

Jesus’s abolition of “us” and “them” categories is so radical that it seems almost impossible for us to comprehend and put into practice.

It is human nature to think that our ways are God’s ways, and so to shun those whose ways seem alien or disgusting to us, but Jesus calls us to recognise God at work in others, however different.