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Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.
Isaiah says explicitly that God prefers another kind of fasting which changes our actual lifestyle and not just punishes our body. (The poor body is always the available scapegoat to avoid touching our purse, our calendar, or our prejudices.) Isaiah makes a very upfront demand for social justice, non-aggression, taking our feet off the necks of the oppressed, sharing our bread with the hungry, clothing the naked, letting go of our sense of entitlement, malicious speech, and sheltering the homeless. He says very clearly this is the real fast God wants!
Jesus has come to transform people, not to exclude them. He has come for the seeming losers, and not to create a country club for the supposed winners.
They are sequentially the misuse of practical everyday power, the misuse of religious power, and the misuse of political power.
We can only be tempted to something that is good on some level, partially good, or good for some, or just good for us and not for others. Temptations are always about “good” things, or we could not be tempted:
Most people’s daily ethical choices are not between total good and total evil, but between various shades of good, a partial good that is wrongly perceived as an absolute good (because of the self as the central reference point), or even evil that disguises itself as good. These are what get us into trouble.
Forgiveness is not some churchy technique or formula. Forgiveness is constant from God’s side, which should become a calm, joyous certainty on our side. Mercy received will be mercy passed on, and “will not return to me empty, until it has succeeded in what it was sent to do.”
Did you know that you only ask for what you have already begun to experience? Otherwise it would never occur to you to ask for it. Further, God seems to plant within us the desire to pray for what God already wants to give us, and even better, God has already begun to give it to us!
It is not that we pray and God answers. It is that our praying is already God answering within us and through us.
Jesus knows he is moving the bar to a much higher plane, and it will be a necessary push to get us there: You are to love with the same kind of love that God loves you, which is total unconditional love. This is the summit and goal of all Jesus’ moral teaching, and we cannot possibly follow it apart from divine union.
It appears that humans can only know themselves through the gaze of others. We call it mirroring. A good parent, like God, naturally blesses the child through their receptive and affirming face.
I know that any kind of defeat or humiliation is not the American way, but it is surely the biblical way.
Oppositional energy never knows what it is for, it just knows what it is against. It is sort of a sad substitute for vision, yet negative people feed on it.
“Patient God, is it really possible that so many of us could be that wrong? Why do we prefer the winners to the losers, when you were clearly one of the ‘losers’ and always on the side of the ‘losers’?”
Naaman’s own servants have to convince him to comply. Finally, he is fully cleansed and healed of his leprosy, but almost entirely in spite of himself! Talk about “amazing grace” being avoided. Talk about someone being healed while missing all the invitations and promises. Naaman is a complete victim of grace! It chooses him; he never really chooses it.
refusal to forgive actually destroys and imprisons the very one who refuses!
“Healing God, give me the courage to move forward, and help me to see that my deepest sin might be my unwillingness to keep growing.”
“God of loving truth, keep me from the world of gossip and accusation. Do not let me ‘kill’ others, even in my mind or heart.”
Once you are awake to the universal truth, then physical death is no enemy to be feared. “Do you believe this?” he says (11:26).
“Good God, the creator of light and darkness, You who move the sun and the stars, move us into the place of light, a light so large that it will absorb all the darkness.”
“the lifted up one.” It has now become a rallying cry for the Jesus who was raised up on the cross and thus “vaccinated us against” doing the same
In each case, we have a Divine Medicine brought down to a small but potent dosage so we can handle it and it can handle us! That is what true spiritual symbols always do. Remember what we said earlier in Lent: Any direct contact with God is like contact with an electric wire—it burns you unless you have some good filters and a very humble humanity to receive it.
“Dear and Divine Physician, I need all of the medicine you are willing to offer me. Give me what I can handle, when I can handle it, and may I let you be the Handler.”
What is happening is that we are withdrawing a human dependency, finding grace to forgive and let go, and relocating our little self in The Self (God), which never betrays us. It can’t! It might take
Jesus dies “for” us not in the sense of “in place of” but “in solidarity with.”
Jesus’ body is a standing icon of what humanity is doing and what God suffers “with,” “in,” and “through” us. It is an icon of utter divine solidarity with our pain and our problems. It is both an external exposing and an eternal holding of the Great Mystery. It is our central transformative image for the soul. Whenever you see an image of the crucified Jesus, know that it is the clear and central message unveiled. It reveals what humanity is doing to itself and to one another. Don’t lessen its meaning by making it merely into a mechanical transaction whereby Jesus pays some “price” to God or
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