texting matthew twenty eight

The end of the beginning. Still texting daily on 07729056452

Mt28v1-2 'always a bolt from the blue for the broken.' Jesus, I pray for myself, that you thunderclap me out of self-centred anxiety. Thunderclap me out of my tombs, my dark places, into your light. For Phil, for the parents, for the question of architecture, for j, for h&a, for l&a, for e, e, i & v, for f. Bolt each from the blue. Amen.

Mt28v3-4 This bolt from the blue, this shock-and-awe, this the shattering sound of history in the making, and the guardians of the status quo are, naturally, discombobulated, being at the epicentre of a reality that is being remade, rules of the universe bent and broken before their eyes. 'like dead men..' could be a faintness and falling over as their grid was shut down by the electro magnetic pulse that just went off. But I rather consider it to be a right comparative, that I, though alive, am as dead before this Lord of light and life, so vastly lifely is he is blazing life.

Mt28v5-6 Look & see where he lay. Adorn your homes with empty crosses as well as crucifixes. Let there be empty spaces in your art, pictures of the emptiness that emptied itself to an empty tomb, which is precisely a plenum, the plenumyist of them all, full of resurrection life, life-in-all-its-fullness-life. Can you feel it in the air?

Mt28v7-8 When I talk about running. We've visited this before in Habakkuk (Hk2v2) goo.gl/p7v6FY : we are heralds and time is short. We have a God who runs Lk15v20, so should we. There is something irreducible about running which an ambling pedestrian Christianity misses, something in the burning lungs, the moments in each stride where you are not touching the ground, the fight, the wind, the ache. There is a propulsive force to such a supernatural event adequately explained, with words (v6). He. Is. Risen. Use those words, because you have to.

Mt28v9-10 While the NIV has Jesus' first words as 'greetings', the GNB has 'peace be with you', echoing Jn20v19, 21, 26 the peace of the Lord be with you, the peace of resurrection, the peace of Pentecost. It is a command to peace, like the command to the raging sea. You are at war in yourself & between yourselves, says Jm4, you are unpeaced by the multitude of voices & chemicals & shocks & abandonments. & suddenly he speaks it: peace be with you.

Mt28v11 "While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city.." - So the dominoes start to fall, this is the progressive collapse of an empire beginning: quiver the city they run to. The resurrection reality breaks in waves, rippling out through space and time. See the narrative threads of a new history divide as these two heralds on two roads bearing one message for two audiences: one man's good news is another's tragedy, both equally urgent. He is risen! He is risen indeed. Oh no.

Mt28v12  "a sufficient sum of money.." (esv) Almost wry the choice of 'sufficient': How much would protect and keep you? What value would you put on a story? 'Sufficient' covers the cost of comfort. Their sufficiency was paid out of the temple taxes or the private funds of vested stakeholders. My comfortable silence is payrolled by polarbears, sweatshops, and my children's children, the voiceless who bear the cost of my fleeting excess. Bribed and blackmailed by modernity I am mercenary first in my definition of 'sufficient' regarding the lifestyle expectations I expect and the violence I permit to enable my entitlement. I am mercenary all over again with the gospel, how often I sell people short, I am economic with the truth, I am silent and so deadly. The proliferation of lies is always lucrative, defending the vested interests of pressure groups pays and reinforcing hegemonic false consciousnesses can make you money, no one has a vested interest in a gospel of free grace, so it is a costly story to tell.

Mt28v13-14 Trading the lie for the truth of God. Trading a belief in magic bullets for a daily cross, & resurrection each morning. Won't you help me to mean it?

Mt28v15-16 Aptly those dubbed 'white-washed tombs' (Mt23v27) extend their personal paintwork to a systematic cover up, a blanket ban, a media campaign, to this day, still painting the Forth Bridge..  My own cosmetic efforts painting, decorating, retouching, reframing my own minor truth claims, refashioning my own whiter than white identity, soon snowballs to cumulative crises requiring an exponentially vast conspiracy. I paint myself in vain (Jr4v30). It need not be. (Is1v18)

Mt28v17 Two ways of reading this verse? There were two groups: the worshipers & the doubters. Or: some doubted, but still they worshiped? Can you imagine the confused desperate prayers at this time, the frantic to-ing & fro-ing in the mind, wanting to be wise, wanting truth, fearing mistakenness. How does one know? As well as the bolt from the blue, let us not underplay the constant, incremental dialectic of doubt & worship, towards the light.

Mt28v18 All authority. Musing on Saturday re Logstrup's 'life is a gift' therefore I have no rights. Rights & authority language always seem to go together in philosophy, but might they not? Might it be that we have authority without rights, for authority too is given as a gift. Jesus says 'is mine' to give us a 'therefore'. We live in an unlikely currency, christian, so pull on your gifted rightless authority, as freely given, to freely give.

Mt28v19-20 goo.gl/gHOhin Mt1-28 therefore go. Mt21v23-24 The servant king's authority empowers, envalues, defends and takes responsibility. Jesus is Lord is the gospel. Therefore go. Mt24v35-36 Jesus knew he was beloved Mt3v17, he knew the bible's commands Mt4v4,7,10, and it's promises 4v16. What do you know? Therefore, go. Mt25v19-20 God loves you yet unconditionally. Therefore go. This is the end of Matthew and the beginning of everything. Go.

texting matthew twenty seven

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Mt27v1 'Early in the morning..': cinematically the sun comes up, it's a new day dawning.. The moment of daybreak, so evocative of new mercies and graces, here connotes unwanted light spilling into an illegal courtroom, where an illicit trial was being concluded, and the hasty scuttling away of evidence from a merciless all-nighter. Vampires and werewolves are we who switch a day face on, masking a murky interior. Rather be day-timers, day-light using, alfresco, fresh air lovers of the light because 'we belong to the day,' 1Th5v8; and 'the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness' Rm13v12; because 'if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.' Jn11v10.

Mt27v2 'Early in the morning.. they bound it up, led it downstairs, handed the black bag of complicated shame over to the authorities.' Think of this every time you put the bins out. It is a not dissimilar moral outsourcing of our dirty work to 'the system'. (See Klein on Morton's 'no away' goo.gl/4oK15u) So much of my sin is invisibly exported in black bags, because I have legitimated putting the moral burden of sustainability on some civic structure, while I indulge over-packaged consumption by night. Apart from the cross, there is no 'away', ours is a closed system of crimes and consequences. Apart from the cross we have only blame-shifting, out-sourcing, scape-goating, guilt-obscuring techniques to save our tribe at the expense of another. We live under Roman rule, some of the civilisation it affords us is not victimless. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Mt27v3 
The damage is done
But mercies are still new
And symbolic gestures
Are where salvation
Springs up

Mt27v4 I am trying to write about Levinas' account of responsibility, which is stronger than we might think can be bourne. He that responsibility begins simply in the basic pre-verbal orientation of non-indifference to the other - that is, to any other one faces. And one finds that one is responsibility even for their responsibilities. There is nothing that is not my business.  No grounds upon which Judas can be dismissed from my life. Too much?

Mt27v5 Guilt without limit prowls about me and the hounds of melancholia consume me. 'Out damned spot.. Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.' Oh, we, little lion men, blighted by a blotted copybook, mark this, we make no honest mistakes.. There is an elegaic choreography as a cast down Judas casts down coins scattering silver somethings to glitter in the dust, a poetic self-scattered dissolution of a self free-falling into nothingness. Such is screaming worldly sorrow, an aptly May Day mayday, crackled into the radio, who hears your distress? What would Godly sorrow have done? Where do I take my guilt?

Mt27v6 Beyond the obvious duplicity of the chief priests declining the money they themselves soiled, this passage raises the question of money's launderability. Certain monies are not permitted in Kingdom purposes, ESVSB cites Dt23v18 as the root of this prohibition, a passage that also speaks against charging interest. Should SpaceMax receive lottery money? Does money carry with it some spirit of its past use and association?

Mt27v7-8 The field of blood is also the potter's field. & it feels like a suicide, like cheap useless clay only good for dry bones, & I am these death images, I am a refugee dying unknown, a guilty suicide scream. But there is a potter, & it is not true that he just leaves me to die, though I tell him so, note the suicidal of clay to potter in Is45v10. Yet Jer18 & Is64v8 should also tremble as Ps139 & Eph2v10 then Is65v17 & 2Cor5v17. Made & loved to live.

Mt27v9-10 We live in a prophetic reality. What is prophecy? Oddly there is a hiccup in the referencing here - a passage clearly in Zc is ascribed to Jr - so the narrative hammer, as it were, is broken and the brief conspicuity of the mechanisms of prophecy brings to the fore the question of the nature of prophecy's essentials which we might otherwise take for granted. Matthew has a familiarity with God's pictures of promise and he had a frame of expectation, an understanding that this life is foreknown, that there is an author God who is weaving details into our history that reinforce his working in our present and future, beautifully. In a prophetic reality we should expect to see patterns, foreshadowings, coherence, recurrence, intentionality, poetry, symbolism.. we live in a parabolic reality and this is exciting. While yet somehow the error allows a gentleness, an elegant anexactitude (Delanda/Husserl) to the mode by which God makes himself gloriously known, while yet, somehow deniable. I am struck this morning by the Jesus of Zc11v7 "So I became the shepherd of the flock doomed to be slaughtered" - this he was and is, this he calls us to be, relentlessly available to the most broken of people. Thank you God.

Mt27v11-12 and why is that a question for you? Why that narrative, why that phantasy? Sometimes Jesus does this - points to the thing behind the thing and then only leaves a silence to thrash around in, the lack of an answer. And it is quite hellish, worse than Sissyphus, who at least had gravity & the nobility of aching muscles. To fall through silence with nothing to hold on to is much worse. Part of the blackness of good friday is the vertigo of a blank white void. But Sunday is coming. The wood at the bottom of the boat smells real as you claw towards him in the storm, & he calms the storm to a different kind of silence. The therapists know there are different types of silence, that can devastate or heal. A new silence us coming; the split-second after He says your name un the garden & you realise its Him. We watch an early Easter morning fire together in silence. The flames permit no void. Alleuia, Christ is Risen.

Mt27v13-14 This is the passage by which Philip leads the Ethiopian eunuch to faith. Silence before a slaughter demands an answer. Unprecedented calm before such a storm of injustice, such composure in the very teeth of death needs to be explained. Jesus' silence here is a function of his being a wide open empty vessel for accusation, a shock absorber for affliction, a great black hole for oppressions, a white blank page for condemnations, an open plug hole in the moral universe draining the dregs through him, with no strainer, with nothing bubbling back. I am struck by this lamb's shearing. Jesus was to be sheared: no one has ever been so naked a Jesus on the cross, stripped of every scrap of clothing, dignity, friendship, protection. Utter shame. My silences are often silences of shame. They are misplaced silences, when I have so much to say, so much to be unashamed about, so much to be unashamed about, so much to tell the Ehtiopian eunuchs.

Mt27v15-16 Do i tend to think that liberation in Christ is more that of a roman governor? Uncertain, arbitrary, impersonal, just for a few, a means-end spectacle without substance? Do I slink away believing I've escaped the death penalty, but without joy, still guilty underneath, a result of chance rather than love? Blamelessness & Belovedness knows more than Barabbas does.

Mt27v17-18 Jesus Barabbas or Jesus "the Christ" (scare quotes Pilate's own) the crowd are taunted to literally choose which 'Jesus' they want. Don't we all. Somewhat in a Life of Brian sense, we pursue a lookalike, Messianic variation, a simulated saviour going by the same name, accidentally or intentionally. And the Jesus we want is the easier one, the more macho one, the murderous nationalistic guerilla leader. ..  'Envy' - "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller.." "I'ma tell you who I be..I'ma make you hate me, cause you ain't me" Deadly comparatives, the slippery slope of sideways glances, envy entails the poisonous abstraction of the irreducible person, envy seeks identity horizontally, competitively. A flimsy way to measure your value, envy is an immaturity, but it is also deadly sin, pointlessly but necessarily antagonistic, it kills both the subject and object of those who enter into it.

Mt27v19-20 waking up from the dream and a sense of something lingers at the periphery, nagging. And then it rushes on you, in remembering, all at once, a whole other world, with a different set of signs & signifiers. Dreams can give us a whole landscape, & there is a whole other landscape, a whole other world inhabiting this one, if we have eyes to see it. What do they say - it makes children laugh & the learned tremble? Pilate here chooses not to see or hear. He is persuaded otherwise, that the shadows are the real thing. But lo! There are angels & demons at war, there is a glint in the eye of the universe, a cascade of meanings unlike the penal system, education system, church system, whatever system you think provides the framework for meaning. Oh my. Rub us thin, oh Lord, that we may see the world transformed, in dreams through windows & then some. We want to see Jesus. 

Mt27v21-22 "And what shall I do with Jesus?" I am struck this morning that we could have asked for some other punishment, a light beating, a prison sentence, something somehow less ultimate and infinite, less superlatively cruel. But where would be the penal substitution in that? Putting a thing to death, finally extinguishing that grit of shame, and the catharsis of making it suffer in the process, is a deep need I have. And when you find me in a crowd, I am truer to that instinct which I have learnt otherwise to politely conceal. Mobs are mobs by the dissolution of singular culpabilities as personal persons are absorbed into the impersonal mass, by this process the depravity within me is unharnessed and bateable, a savagely more authentic fearful carnal violence by which I save myself by literal scapegoating. Football hooligans and London rioters are theologians with an understanding of the penalty that must be paid.

Mt27v23-24 When we say the creed I often think that it seems unjust that pilate is singled out by name, over & over in church history, for his culpability,  when we are all thus. But what of most urgent importance might be highlighted in this moment, for all humanity? v24 is on responsibility & individuation, which my current paper hopes to speak to. Pilate does not answer the normative demand upon him, choosing people-pleasing, & as such he is not even an 'I', not really. There is nothing to single him out, no substance. He forfeits his identity to the totality, the crowd's totality & the myth of collective responsibility (different from shared responsibility) already a totality, & so a death. So we remember the Pilate, and what he wasn't, & pray most urgently for the courage to be, which is, to respond to the call. To respond to the call.

Mt27v25-26 "His blood be on us and on our children" As if to emphasise the callous cruelty of their murderous calls for capital punishment, they offer their children to pay the price. Suggesting a nihilistic understanding of Jesus life as offensive, their own lives cheap, and their children's lives as nothing. Costly: death abounds because, who counts the cost when you have nothing to loose? Who counts the cost when their is no one to repay? Who counts the cost to their children of the murders we make in this life? As in the Act of Killing, they know not what they are doing. As in abortion, as in the looming environmental disaster, we offer up our children to pay the price. We call down guilt flippantly like it's a flimsy thing, because our consciences are seared: life, ethics, reality have become sin-less, guilt-less, god-less power-play.

Mt27v27-28 120-200 soldiers, here to scream at this one man. A la Ignatius I can imagine into most gospel characters. Except Jesus himself. Here is especially hard, the roar of clanging crowd, all 200 of them their contempt focused on me. Exposed, with rough abusive hands stripping me of my clothes, making me a piece on a game. The roar of blood in the ears, I cannot get too close, like a repressed memory, fearful. Such is the humiliation my of Christ.

Mt27v29-30 Ahead of preaching on James 3 in June, I have been given to think about the power of words, and connectedly of pictures, symbols, the tragic theatre of the school playground and the many non-contact ways we break a person. I have thought of the cross and the preceding abuse it entailed as primarily physical, because in the end he dies physically. If he had survived this ordeal, perhaps more would be made of the breadth and depth of the abuse to his person, value, identity. Somewhat as the portrait of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, vicious shaming, the savage deconstruction of persons. Jesus knows the pain of contact torture, but he knows also the utter and ugly ways we malign and misrepresent, disempower and destroy verbally, conceptually. Jesus knows what it is to be held in utter contempt, to be a plaything and a nothing. When no one believes you, or knows you or cares in the slightest, when all shades of bitterness are held against you, when your dreams are trampled and the glorious kingdom in-breaking through mustard seeds is made sport of by a brutal economy. Jesus has been there, he knows you, he weeps and he hopes alongside you.

Mt27v31 That they put Jesus' clothes back on him is the clear demarcation of a ritual of mocking, opened and closed. How do I 'thing' my abuses & thus compartmentalise & legitimise them? I was going to send the text as is, but realise I ask a hypothetical question, with no intention of letting it put me in question. Professionalism is such a way. I think of my self as not a professional,  as a bumbling humantities-grad-hotchpotch, but perjorative professionalism (the 'ism' making it different from what it is to do a job excellently) is still to be found here, in the trajectory assumed & of what of personhood (mine or other) can be sacrificed for its thingedness. And not just in work but in all things one feels one needs to have 'together'. Oh God, who distorts nothing, make us good all the way through.

Mt27v32 Do you seriously think I have the time in my day to carry this cross? I feel your imposition, taken by the scruff of the neck, physical rage and physical constraints. Do you know how inconvenient this is? Surely a well-boundaried person wouldn't be carrying this cross. A successful person wouldn't be carrying this cross. I couldn't begin to believe you that this - This - is it. This is IT. Its going on right now, the salvation drama, the for all, the symbol & event. The cross. This cross. Forced into my day. This. Is. It.

Mt27v33-34 Two verses about being a body, being alive when surrounded by death, being incarnate to the bitter end. v33 Skulls. Commentaries try to align Golgotha's skullishness with a cranial topography or perhaps a litter of dry bones, regardless, it connotes an environment marked by death, designed for death, resigned to death. Consider Hirst's For the Love of God: image culture right now is death streaked, even death saturated, sallow bony angular models in skull scarfed gothic derivatives celebrate an inert fleshless structuralistic stasis. See also John Carpenter's film 'They Live' for the skullishness of contemporary Being Dis-incarnate. v34 Drink, 'a stupifying draught' says one commentary. Carrying your cross daily without anaesthetic? This is a tricky matter of conscience. Is it? Authenticity and transparency, proclamation and sacrifice, the cost of the pain of the cost counted for the radically inescapist God we claim to represent. When is it Christian to be stoic? When is it virtuous to forego comfort food, escapist literature, paracetamol and Redbull?

Mt27v35-36 Two verses on ways of detachment? v35 it was good to learn from J. last week that Jesus' clothes were gambled for not only as part of an indignity of stripping & dispossessing, but also as an extended part of the coronation parody.  Parody, as all irony, tends to death & detachment. It de-personalises persons, it forces me to stay outside the I-thou. Similarly v36 they watched him. There is a watcher observer position that is necessary detached, that keeps the other a he a she an alien, not a you. Dear Christ, who challenges me with a look in the eye & not just a character in a play to watch to admire to mock. It is you. You you you.

Mt27v37 Words. James 3 is all about words, the 'tongue' is something of a distracting metonym, the wriggly incidental agent, the one that lays that landmines. Urgent to consider is the power of statements we make, the landmines themselves, the identities we write over people. They are a death sentence. Facts rendered in a mocking tone with saberous irony, half truths calculated to wound. 'King of the Jews' is vicious exercise in missing the point, while being yet devastatingly spot on. We kill Jesus twice, doubting him as King, and then knowingly committing the daylight murder of the most inconvenient King. They are double-minded ones that word this way Jm1v8.

Mt27v38 Between thieves. Jesus hangs with sinners, associates with the worst, lets his reputation be hung shredded in bad places. Thus he is numbered among the transgressors Is53v12, go deeper. So he finds the temple of his body struck down between another den of thieves Mt21v13, go deeper. So this is his glory, and they are thieves at his left and right hand Mk10v37. But finally I am led to meditate of the triad of crucifixees. How necessary it seems that there should have been three hanged, a triangle of relations, as we are always relating to Jesus as other, and relating to other others relating to Jesus. Lk23v39-43 makes the most of this joint portrait. Who do you say Jesus is? Who do others say you say Jesus is?

Mt27v39-40 There's a rationalism, an indignance,  a self-satisfaction within such mockery. The knowing eyes-to-the-camera of mock the week. Like the false righteousness of false righteous anger. A word to the philosopher especially, wanting to 'test her hypothesis' as a bargaining disbelief. Oh batter my heart, 3-personed God,  save me, keep me from mirror-views that go nowhere.amen

Mt27v41-42 Smile for me. Jesus knew street harassment, he was familiar with loutish bland bullying barbarity, being the butt of the joke. Regard his epic meekness, utter non-violence, perfectly effective. There is a structure to true salvation, contrasted with the measure used by his antagonists who would follow him if he proved himself to be more like them: the self-interested follow self-saviours. Jesus' salvation is very different. As his taunters, so am I similarly impatient for quick fixes, I twitch a dirth of poetry and foresight, ungenerous embittered, I pray if-then prayers.

Mt27v43-4 Jesus' belovedness under attack, not primarily plans or purposes, not coherence, but belovedness. Not 'God would save you if he wanted it', but 'if he wanted you'. Wanted you. Desired you. If he loved you, things would be different. Beloved.  You keep using this word, but I do not think it means what you think it means, Sarah. Letting my words be few, I pray to know my belovedness of God, & you yours. On the edge of vision I ache to know.

Mt27v45-46 Plunged into darkness, the viscous air, a thickly painted totality, subterranean pitch, blind and infinite. The world blacks out. We extinguished the only animating illumination, the one point source which gave light and shadow to a moral reality, we crack the vacuum of the filament bulb and, at the speed of light, all colour, contrast, shade and tone are eviscerated. Then, through the jet black, rings a hoarse urgent clarion call. My God. My God. The dark I experience in myself is the dark of abandonment: the dark of a short-circuited reality in which I choose against God, the dark I tinted windows with for the shady dealings of my soul. What a strange transaction at the cross, that this blackout which I carry with me could be transferred? As if every man's dark glasses of sin took flight in that one moment, and swarmed locust-like across the sky to calvary. Do you see it?

Mt27v47-48 Trying to over-construct a meaning today. Interested to learn that there are two Greek words for wine: 'ozos' & 'onios', connoting good & bad (?) wine, or even more subtly types of bad - between sour wine & bitter wine (?). Does a meditation on the differences between bitterness & sourness have anything to teach me? I cannot find it. I feel God wants to remind of the more straightforward truth that he suffers-with, he pains-with thirsts-with is misunderstood-alongside. We are with Christ because he first was with us.

Mt27v49 'Wait..' You see Christ in his glory, majestic in salvation, convincing in his miracles, unsurpassed in his kindness, are you yet waiting? Is yours a tragic faith? Suspecting the worst, timidly procrastinating, hesitant, waited down.. Blind to see the already-now-ness of Rm8v1 'There is *now* no condemnation..' Don't wait for Elijah, don't dither for further proofs. Again I am reminded of Gideon, threshing grain in the wine press, killing time, treading water, letting the world go by. God, take the wait off me. Bring me into the now. 

Mt27v50 'yielded up his spirit..' Crucial in this verse is the active verb, he didn't lose his life, and no one took it from him, he gives it up willingly. Interesting in this verse is 'his spirit..' 'They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death .. The weight of a stack of five nickels. The weight of a hummingbird.' Without problematically dichotomising body and spirit, what is this spirit? If I could picture my spirit (somewhat like a Patronus from Harry Potter..), perhaps I would speak to it as the Psalmist (57, 103 etc) does.. And so command my molten core, my substance. Come on my soul, awake my soul.

Mt27v51 this verse. As I spend the week thinking about types of love, I note that this picture has God's agape for us leading to philia. God loves us downwardsly, from top to bottom, not because God lives in the sky, but because of the 'descending' quality of agape, love that loves because it loves, not because its object is lovable. So Christ died for us while we are still sinners. But agape, creating value in us, make us beautiful, & we get to go through the torn down curtain, into the holy of holies. We get to spend with-time with God, face-to-face philia time behind the curtain. He calls us friends. The death of the Christ loves us from love to love (to love).

Mt27v52 Christ died and immediately the dead are raised! I do not pay attention to this verse. Like a seed being dropped in the soil and immediately flowers springing up within 3 seconds. God brings us to life in lots of gentle ways, but sometimes it is violent, absolute & immediate. So we are praying for healings today, for Phil for F for V. Please. Because Christ died, once for all, to bring us to God. Spring up new life!

Mt27v53-54 A strange glitch in the life death continuum causes unexpected side effects.. So weird a going-on that commentators have to juggle their chronology to make sense of this. I like to think that Jesus' death damaged death itself, that he fell to hell with such a force that the watchful guardians of the dead are knocked off guard and having no time to regroup, some of their captives are allowed sneak out. And so glorious undead saints rise to add zombies to the seismic pandemonium going on upstairs. Some of this is speculation. Importantly and absolutely these verses reinforce that there is a domain of death that has been dealt a once-and-for-all blow in the historic event of Jesus death. And so, like the centurion we should be filled with awe.

Mt27v55-56 hey friends. Mary Mary & gang. I know your worlds have been shattered & your hearts are heavy within you. Your grief is hidden from us here, but surely all numbness & unknowing has stolen everything. It is hard to speak to those who are grieving, it is. I know I do not know all the ache of your ache. But quietly, let me speak it, between letting you sob or rage. Easter is coming, & he will speak your names & his truth 28v9, Jn21v16.

Mt27v57-58 There will be rich people in heaven. They will be those who use their wealth for excessive worship, and who risk their political status in pursuit of the impractical, tenuously symbolic, displays of prophetic extravagance: asking the empire for the body of a criminal guilty of high treason, wrapping the dead body in an epic quantity of myrrh and aloes and putting it in an piece of privileged cemetery real estate - for what? James 2 basically writes off rich people, Jesus also uses eye-of-needle hyperbole to emphasise that the rich people getting in heaven will be statistically negligible. All my sacred textees are in the global 1%, and we would do well to take a leaf out of Joseph of Aramathea's book and do something excessive, aromatic, and politically dangerous today.

Mt27v59-60 Struck by the parallel with lk2v7 joseph of arimathea wrapping jesus' body in cloth & laying it in  tomb, as mary wrapped his body in cloth & laid him in a manger. (Her firstborn. And He will be the firstborn from the dead col1v18.) Joseph also an exemplar of extravagant worship, like another mary mt26v7 - how long would it take to cut a tomb out of rock without machines? Let us be such lovers of the light; brooding mothers & generous artisans.

Mt27v61-62 The day  after the day of Preparation. The day after the preparation for the Sabbath, ie. the Sabbath itself. The phrasing is made to distinguish it from the Passover which is also a Sabbath. But also possibly chosen to hint at an end-of-all-preparations-for-all-Sabbaths.. Sabbaths before now were enactments of an anticipated event. All subsequent Sabbaths celebrate an historic and on going reality. Momentous. 

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Mt27v65-66 This tragicomic scene plays a gaggle of cowardly baddies in a spoof gangster movie flailing chaotic schemes from the enemy camp: all this weaponry at their disposal and they are bickering: '.. no you appoint the guards'. The incompetent and grovelling henchmen  of a wearied evil genius, vexed that he is threatened now by even a dead man. Elaborate if nothing else.. we want a tamper-evident seal, like you get on fire exits and jam jars. And then.. a bunch of roman soldiers, maybe 4, maybe 60. Peter is watched by 16 in Ac12v4, so inclined to go with the more absurd estimates. Absurd. As the efforts I make to deceive God and suppress the truth, over engineered if there is no God, woefully thin if there is.

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Mt26v1-2 And then.. 'The Son of Man is betrayed..' Then, and now. The Son of Man is betrayed: paradidotai (Gk). KJV retains the devastating urgent present tense. The Son of Man is betrayed, by me, in daily denials, minor forgettings, major omissions? Like, where's my oil? How are the least of these? Jesus' preamble of Mt25 and preceding sets up a convicting passion narrative.

Mt26v3-4 Which bits of my mind are chief priests & elders? My comfort-driven id, my legalistic superego? & as I kill God I go to my own grave with my song still in me, come holy spirit, be free to be God, make me wild to sing. Wonder & amazement.

Mt26v5-6 An interesting pair of verses, we contrast [1] the chief priests' abstract and fearful notion of 'the people' against [2] Jesus' warm and hospitable encounter with exactly one of those, Simon the definite article. Interrogating the nature of those relationships: [1] You may not be prone to riot, but do your leaders know the strength of your affection for Jesus? Do you comport that affection politically? Chrstian Concern may be a bit wild at the edges, but at least they are not doing nothing. [2] Simon-the-Leper comes with some speculation about his name - most popular is the claim that he is an ex-leper healed by Jesus, as Matthew-the-Publican Mt10v3 retains he ascription after his transformation as a what-some-of-you-once-were brand of testimony 1Co6v11. Named and unashamed. What is mine?

Mt26v7-8 secretly we're all utilitarians about something, at some level of justification or frustration. A worldview in 2d not 3d, as though with one eye shut. You look but you do not see, you do not see the depth dimension. & how you see & don't-see changes your behaviour, it changes how you use your resources, as this woman, it changes your attitude to others, as the disciples. Where is my extravagant 'wasteful' worship today? In what way does our use of time, money, thought, gaze, making, wording come to a waste unless there is a different economy? Give us eyes to see.

Mt26v9-10 Contempt for smells and bells is a curiously Protestant predisposition. To the utilitarian that I am, olfactory ministry is frustratingly invisible and temporal, difficult to justify as impossibly to measure and duly disregarded by our strangely pragmatistic church. So, Phil, seek to be more five-sensed and fully embodied in your worship, it is biblical. Charity which is not the toxic, reductive and self-serving kind, consists in seeking the fully-personal dignity of the individual otherwise classed and abstracted as 'the poor'. Good charity should seek less to give-for-the-alleviation-of-discomfort but rather, by demonstration and aggressive liberation to free people of all poverties into an agency of giving extravagantly themselves, worshiping extravagantly, living poetically. Thus should SpaceMax by judged by its aroma.

Mt26v11 There is a difference between our relationship with the risen Jesus, and the disciples' relationship to the embodied Jesus, both pre- & post- resurrection? We stretch out to the incarnation with our imagination where they could stretch out with their limbs. Their experience of Christ, his words & his way, his resurrection - these would have been a paradigm shift different to ours in some ways. We can imagine, empathise, learn, open ourselves to what it might have been like to experience Jesus as the disciples did, and that we do too. But as this is often the emphasis, we should also think about how our experience of Jesus is different to that of the disciples, to respect their otherness. Not as a resignation to not-knowing or even knowing-less, but knowing-differently. Knowing by analogies & traces, as well as words & spirit-flamed imagination, & more. Questions on this still, but looking to see.

Mt26v12 So it is lent, we are journeying towards the cross, preparing Jesus for burial, preparing ourselves. Each Easter I pray to understand something the cross, for it is a difficulty & a mystery. Dear Christ, as the woman at Bethany prophetically prepared you for death, so in these Lenten weeks please prepare our hearts for your death, help us to understand & enter into the work of redemption spoken & given by your death & resurrection. Please, give us new eyes to see Good Friday & Easter Sunday, as you see. amen.

Mt26v13-14 Spilt ointment, spilt beans. The tell-tale and the tale told. Good news travels fast, so does gossip. Generosity is contagious, yet also, greed infects. It is for his fame that we are made famous. Go, into the whole world, find a platform, tell a story, be a story told.

Mt26v15-16 What are my 30 pieces? I betray the real faces around me for the 30 pieces of daydreams in my head, daydreams of images of my own cleverness, sexiness, braveness or visible kindness. I'll betray the church for a quiet life, i'll betray my husband for the rush & the rage. Betrayal exchanges the truth of God for a lie. Betrayal is always the worship of a false god or gods, & when they have you, you're v16 always looking for the opportunity to betray the true God for the false one, because it feels so good, & its so easy.  Betrayal can happen at every level of life, in thought, word & deed. All betrayals are betrayals of Christ. Betrayal is the opposite of hospitality, it does not know how to give, it will always use self & others as means not ends. Betrayal rots integrity like a bad apple. Dear Christ, scrape me out, make me new. amen.

Mt26v17-18 And don't worry about the vase.. What vase? - One way or another Jesus-as-Oracle has a prescience of future contingencies. And that changes they way his disciples enter the City. And it should change your comportment towards the city-as-space-for-celebration. And it should change the City. 'In 2011 in England and Wales, Dorling notes, 66 million bedrooms serviced a population of 55 million. Even in central London there are more bedrooms than people.' Where should we prepare a feast for our homeless saviour? The housing crisis that needn't be is a hospitality crisis that shouldn't be. Go, with an attitude of treasure hunting to a supernatural geo-caching to appropriate the invisible geography of London. Be bold to borrow space, be generous to give rooms away, be imaginative to improvise: urgently and obediently should we celebrate.

Mt26v19-20 Preparing food together, sitting down to eat together. Lets prepare a Passover meal this year? Trying to imagine-into those hours of preparation, a ritual for both remembering & foretelling, the Passover meal laden with the symbolism of a shared history, of God's faithfulness to ancestors, & for each of these Jewish disciples - the sights & sounds would be connected to each celebration of the Passover since childhood, each family surely having its own quirks as to how-to-prepare (wondering if they swapped stories as they worked about how mum did the unlevened bread). But also a rite of preparation, like the woman at Bethany preparing Jesus for burial without even knowing it. Let us be mindful of each meal preparation, for each meal can be something of this, of how shared food speaks to past present future, to sustenance provision community, in remembering, in prophecy, in joy.

Mt26v21-22 This morning's prayer: "Is it I, Lord?" - Is it I? For you know me better than I know myself. Is it I? Presents the 'I' neither motivated to deflect a guilty conscience rendered in 'What I do wrong now?' nor in the mock rhetorical deflection of 'Pretentious, moi?' Is it I? This is a humble and humbling, baring and desperate question. Is it I? As Ps139v23-24 - Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! Is it I? Protests nothing, submits everything. Is it I, Lord? Lord contrasts directly with Judas' address of 'Teacher' (v25). This downgrades your confessional to a mere exercise in words, a teacher does not know your heart, a teacher does not command your allegiance. Jesus is Lord. Jesus please be my Lord, and search me, and sustain me, and let me be faithful one more day.

Mt26v23-24 The classic tension of the 'as it written' & the 'woe to you' of betrayal, the tension between determinism & freedom, between God's sovereignty & my personal responsibility. Yes yes, we've had this conversation hundreds of times. So what are we to do? How does jesus try to have this conversation? He just states that this is how it is in the fabric of things, that God does & will weave together narratives with meaning, & also that we are free to be culpable. It strikes me on this point that the surrender of prayer is very much not a quietism. Surrender just lets the spirit rush in, to reconfigure the way it is in my heart, that i then have a more-than resource for my individual & collective responsibilities. It's a glorious dance; the opposite of betrayal is a beautiful dance.

Mt26v25 'You have said it..' is not a million miles from the playground taunt: 'I know you are so what am I? I know you are so what am I?..' Jesus, however, aches to draw us to a true knowledge of ourselves and a true knowledge of himself, by taking us back to our own words, wherein are found our selfdeceptions. Maybe Judas doesn't even realise how deep in he has fallen. Oh Phil, listen to yourself, thinking you are so clever with words. Phil, beware your own charade of faith, in which I am not that bad, and in which Jesus is a mere teacher.

Mt26v26 This is my body. Parabolic realism [1] What is a body? [2] What is it to injest it?[1] 'This is my body' - Body as the vessel Jesus was carried by is to be shattered for the distribution of his substance, like a seed planted to multiply, like a million sparks kicked from a burning log igniting a sea of dried leaves. Jesus' body was a finite whole, a singularity, miraculously however, when divided it is no less effective a vehicle for his ministry, now limitlessly viral. [2] 'Take, eat' - Taking Christ into your own metabolism as a flavour craved, an appetite quenched, a strength regained. Be therefore ravenous for spiritual milk, be satisfied with the bread of life. Come hungry, and go feed my sheep.

Mt26v27-28 Blood & the christian mystery. Gather round. The new covenant is both like & unlike the old, for, if there is a God, then parabolic realism works in its own hermeneutic circle, with God using symbols to draw us into more symbols, meanings to draw us to deeper meanings. If Lv17 feeds back into God's meaning-making project, God speaks redemption truths into human history, where symbols beget symbols, meanings beget more & new meanings. In such a place, God saves us. & so, as I pull at the boundaries of my skin, I think of the way bleeding comes always as a transgression, it is the deep parts of the self brought out to the surface. So Christ for me, & he says: 'Daughter, your sins are forgiven'. God, through Christ, is reconciling us to himself. Thanks be to God for this new covenant, deep & wide.

Mt26v29 'I will not drink again' - One last drink and then his wine had run out, as the family in Jn2:1-11. Jesus begins and ends his ministry with wine. Apt that in a few verses Mt27v34, on the cross, he will be offered wine vinegar. Wine is perpetually a picture of heaven in-breaking Is25:6, Je31:12, Jl3:18, Am9:13-14 the ecstatic sensation of joy, the abundant economy of creation crafted excellently, so now, when the bringer of Heaven is to be abused and rejected, his work of parabolic realism sours and ceases.


Mt26v30 'After singing..' Why do we sing? When do we sing? OvalHouse Theatre yesterday advocated, somewhat dryly, the dramatic arts as a programmatic means to therapeutic conditioning and self-conscious self-reflection. Earlier that day Peter had encouraged singing as a start to each day and as a route into tongues. Peter's seems both the more ordinary and the more radical. When do I sing and why? The disciples were launching out into the night (illicitly? Ex12v22). Somewhat like Acts16v25, this is weaponised worship, and Paul will later advocate doing likewise Eph5v19, Col3v16. Before anything, worship. # I can feel it in my bones, in my bones, its a fire. goo.gl/glZZzM

Mt26v31-32 A perfect pair of verses, as i'm sure jesus intended, in the speaking of these side-by-side, so conjuncted. History & narrative, meaning & truth. You will run away from the Christ, but in his resurrection, he will always be ahead of you. I wondered what to do with the first verse as i walked this morning, when one knows one's traitor heart, and is still in one's treachery. You will run away. I will. I do. I am. What to do with the knowing-your-betrayal and still not feeling motivated to turn away turn around turn back? The second verse comes as the answer. Jesus says to my face and from all sides: I am always already ahead of you. You will never be able to outrun my grace. You can't draw back to anyplace that my mercy won't reach. Easter is always before us. Easter is always waiting to meet us at the shore. 

Mt26v33-34 There but for the grace of God go I? There go I. Where I have committed myself to Church, to HomeGroup, to SpaceMax in Phil's flimsy strength and not in Jesus' powerful supply, there am I being sifted (Lk22v31), on those points am I being brought to a knowledge of myself, there, by crisis after crisis, am I having my arrogance laid bare. Apt that my body should give out under this pressure. And yet, may it be that I might be so bold as Peter and bolder: ardently committed, not to the box I have put God in, but to God and through God and with God and from God. A prematurity of boldness, as Peter's, misses that God who is wilder than you think, a God whose crucifiction that is more real than you imagine, a God who helps you in a ministry that is way harder than you expected and a God who yet loves you, you who are more frail that you know. 1Th5v24 correctly locates the agent of faith.

Mt26v35-36 Never say never, never say always? But more, the belief that faith will never crumble, integrity will never slide, that one's marriage will never break down, one's community will never scatter - just because they musn't, is apt to thingify something that actually depends on one's free responsibility. Jesus' 'sit here' is a command, an invitation & a choice. It won't happen by default because the baddies are out in the woods too, & running away will quickly fill up the foreground. So: quietly now / for she is very near / & though she doesn't frighten easily / you must know by now / that you do / ~ Padraig.

Mt26v37-38 # "why does my heart cry feelings I can't fight.. It's more than I can stand.." gets me every time. Moulin Rouge's El Tango rushes to mind partly as an unsurpassed crescendo of tragic expression, but I refer you here also for the devastating power of polyphony, the harmonic power of joint voices yearning, as I ponder, why did Jesus take these disciples with him at this moment? For company? For witness? For support? For accountability? For a bass note counterpoint in his miserere? Or all of the above, and more basically, because life is lived withwards. Jesus elsewhere adjures us to live pray go eat preach withwards: the two or three gathered in Mt18v20; the two by two sent in Lk 10v1; the two or three witnesses of 2Cor13v1.. etc. But why here? Unlike Tiny Tempah, who walks alone, cause he was born alone.. Our God relates, he's more than sort of known. Am I? Do I suffer-with? Do I bottle it up or do I let people in? Is mine a grief observed? When the shit hits the fan, who is with me, who triangulates me?

Mt26v39 Trinitarian tangles, & the look of love. What is it to experience the will of the Other? What is it to align one's own will in the same direction? If the first is that identified in the phenomenology of a 'reverse intentionality', then there is more identified here in the God-life, the choice of an 'inverse intentionality'. The Godhead is an ongoing inversion of will, the 'circle of love' pictured in rublev's icon. & there's a seat at the table for me, to learn & to join in this kenosis.

Mt26v40 spiritual sleepyface, still. Rouse my soul, wild spirit, for a new season of worship with words, and more than words. amen.

Mt26v41-42 Jesus' disciples were likely teenagers goo.gl/MUwQSL. He calls them to do hard things goo.gl/xMvMqe. Contrast this with the sleepwalkers tragically addicted in Beeban Kidron's excellent/terrifying documentary inreallifefilm.com. Jesus issues a call to to wakeful maturity out of our slumber of extended adolescent, in a call to active engagement out of good intentions, a call to integrate flesh and spirit out of a partitioned faith. Watch and pray. Often, I'm not prayerful because I'm not watchful, other times I'm not watchful because I'm not prayerful, I'm sleepy, spiritually dozed off, I'm logged on but checked out, adrift and drifting off, treating life as one long nap time.. So watch and pray. &. Open eyes & open mouth. To give & receive. Listen & learn. With your flesh & your spirit. Holy Spirit come and caffienate me out of a woozy la la land, that I that I might have night vision to be a watching watchman in dark places, urgently.

Mt26v43 The exhortation at the end of the freedom course: 'keep going.' 'Keep Going!' 'KEEP GOING'! Again again. Wake up, Sarah. 'wake up!' WAKE UP! AND KEEP STAYING AWAKE!' sing yourself to standing.

Mt26v44 The rule of threes applied to prayer. 'Once is an incident, twice a co-incidence, thrice, a pattern.' Not for a forgetful audience, but for a speaker's failing heart.

Mt26v45-46 "Sleep now." There is the sort of confusion in the commentaries that tends to arise when Jesus is using irony. Sleep now, yes, but it'll have to be a power nap, things are about to get extremely unsleepy. Prayer parallels sleep, with eyes closed and body prostrate, both comportments seek a strength restored. But in one the mind is engaged ferociously, in the other it is an acknowledged absurdity to sleep furiously. Sleep is generally a negative concept in the bible eg. Pr24v33 with exceptions like Ps127v2. So, how much sleep is enough? How much prayer is sufficient? Perhaps this is not the point. When I am weary, I sleep; when I am anxious, I oversleep. As when I am hungry, I eat; when I am frustrated, I overeat.  Ways our fickle appetites are met, assuaged and compensated reveal our dependencies, our sources, our idols. In this lent of fasting caffiene, I have learnt that I trusted espresso more than the Holy Spirit to strengthen me for the day. Trial is coming, God, please, teach me to take my appetites to you in prayer now.

Mt26v47-48 Giving-signs. You live semiotically, whether you like it or not. You are a sign to the world you inhabit, you are thousands of signs, signals & signifiers. Reading yesterday that the linguistic (& non-linguistic) system of meanings is open, we are always free to make up new words, to sing a new song, to be part of the holy task of living out deeper & wider symbols. Your sign life can be signs subverted, signs disturbed, signs made new - but will they be for the glory of Christ or for his betrayal? Let us push in, that in our words & bodies we may be signs & wonders, rather than a Judas kiss.

Mt36v49-50 We've met this 'friend' hetaire (gk) before in Mt20v13 and 22v12. One of the most haunting ascriptions in the bible, the affectionate word is repurposed as cautionary, yet one cannot hear it as glib, there is a plaintive yearning-yet-ness to it. By contrast, Judas plays the antagonist in this masquerade of friendship, repurposing a kiss, and here kataphileó (gk) is a kiss in the superlative. Awkwardly over-enthusiatic in some renderings 'kiss profusely', it is the same word as in Lk7v38's sinful woman anointing Jesus' feet. Pasolini's film has this as an embrace comforting a fearful Judas. So we, trembling, complicated, frustrated, treacherous, yet even then embraced.

Mt26v51-52 A deeper & less likely logic to Jesus' pacifistic statement than might first appear. Easy to read as the idea that violence begets more violence (it does) & to infer that therefore non-violence begets non-violence, that if one does not live by the sword one will not die by the sword. But of course, we know that Gethsemane leads to Calvary, that Christ, in not living by the sword, is about to die by the sword. So 'die by the sword' must mean something more than it means. There's death and death, because though Jesus was about to die by the sword, he was also to be raised to life on the third day. The non-violence that dies by the sword is to hear Jesus say 'i am the resurrection & the life, even though you die by the sword, even shall you live,' knowing that eternal life is a quality of life found in those overlapping circles. The basis of Hauerwas' christological pacifism.

Mt26v53-54 On what basis do I presume the privilege of pacifism? Non-violence is not reckless gambling, not callous unjustice, not lazy negligence *only* if it is supernatural. It is cruel folly to choose suffering for yourself and others, it is pointless and ungodly masochism to choose to endure needless hardship and defeat, it is costly cowardice to choose to lose this battle, unless victory is assured and you have already won the war. Without that final assurance, it is right and loving to be as Peter or Samson - go down fighting, raise hell, impetuous and impotent but at least you tried. Jesus doesn't gamble with possible outcomes of fist fights with flimsy weapons, there is no risk in his plan, calmly decisively he makes his outcome certain: he chooses to lose his life. How could you lose yours?

Mt26v55-56 Both the cowardice of the crowd's two faces & the cowardice of the disciple's self-justified fleeing are in my heart. Or were. For. Rather than wallow in my coward heart, worship the Christ that today is a new day, new mercies. What wonder, what joy! 'Be obedient to God, & do not let your lives be shaped by those desires you had when you were still ignorant. Instead be holy in all you do ... For you know what was paid to set you free from the worthless manner of life handed down by your ancestors .. it was the costly sacrifice of Christ ... & so your faith & hope are fixed on God.' 1Pt1 Amazing.

Mt26v57-58  [Scene change] We transition from the garden to the city, we enter the holy of Holy Week, we enter into an architecture of power, conspiracy and murder. I feel Peter's urban anxiety. "# Weep for yourself, my man, / You'll never be what is in your heart / Weep, little lion man, / You're not as brave as you were at the start.." I woke up this morning with the call of Gideon Jg6v11 on my mind. Oh being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong tools, for the wrong job. Fear keeps you there. Lies keep the fears there. Don't be huddled round any fire except the fire that burns lies and fear away Jg6v21 Ac2v3.

Mt26v59-60 I'm in this courtyard and I don't know where I am. Am I judge or jury, false witness or watching in the wings? And why is he not speaking? And I've  already decided how the verdict should go, I just need some references to back up my claims, no blows to the back of the head here please. And why is he not speaking? Should I be speaking for him? Where are his friends? These references aren't very good, no-one here is convinced, but then, they don't need convincing. What even is evidence? He's unsettling me a bit. I really don't know what he's thinking. He's sort of annoying me but i don't know how to look away. What is truth? And why is he not speaking?

Mt26v61-62 Witch hunts, terror and imperiled architecture. There is a familiar and specially urban quality to this fear-mongering. Buildings embody the thin resilience, indeed the fundamental frailty of the system in which we have put our trust, they are tasked with carrying an absurd symbolic weight of security, comfort, identity and eternity. Tate's current Ruin Lust exhibition dabbles in the power of this anxiety, the sense of impending future ruination profoundly affects life in the now. As Caiaphas', so our Ruin Lust makes defensive and litigious the ways we dwell, risk, build, relate. .. Read another way, we see God in the dock, standing accused of intention to commit an Act of God. Jesus anticipates this attitude of accusation in Mt25v24: a 'hard man reaping where he hadn't sown'. We want to pin the problem of evil on God, we want to scapegoat him, I want that this mess of my sin, selfishness, architecture, cowardice, and fallibility would not be my fault.

Mt26v63-64 The high priest asks in a way that no Jew cannot answer. & Jesus responds with the promise of sight, of vision, of revelation. So we always find ourselves, in the midst of sound & vision, command & disclosure, rumours of rumours & promises of illumination. The trace of presence within absence, all the impatience of hope, and the demand that we answer the other. Oath-maker, cloud-breaker, I am gathered around Him and His story today. 

Mt26v65-66 v66 'What do you think?' Twenty-six chapters of evidence textees, what conclusions do you draw from it? 'What do you think?' See last Easter Saturday we read Mt12v27-28, also a blasphemy question, also with Pharisees, also demanding a decision: Is Jesus power from God or the Devil? 'What do you think?' I think I'd say the Devil, I think I'd vote to kill Jesus. 'What do you think?' Jesus' teaching is obscenely Jesus-centred. I am the way, the truth. I and the Father are one. You heard it said, but I tell you. I have authority to forgive sins.. He comes making outrageous claims about his identity and power, dangerous and manipulative promises to the very vulnerable, he lays the foundation for a personality cult of the vilest and most pathological kind. If such a teacher came to St Marks and sought to commandeer the flock, to woo them as a pied piper, to excite in them a premature expectation of a new age, imagine the damage he could do. 'What do you think?'  Consider the language you use to condemn prosperity gospel preaching. Summon a memory of the squalid flats on estates where a larger than life preacher on a glowing screen adds cruel misery to their situation by promising an easy exit. Multiply the righteous anger for justice you feel at that slick TV blasphemy. And then consider the peril to a whole city by the rising of a besotted rabble of fanatics irrationally destabilising the pax romana of our dozy capitalism, this is urgent - your world will be undone. Swiftly silence this catastrophe, nip it in the bud, head it off at the pass. .. Apt that Jesus should die for blasphemy. Blasphemy allows for only one God, and if Phil is that God, the virtues of any other candidate for the role become precisely their vices. I kill God for being God. .. Oh Phil, rend your heart, not your garments this Easter, come humbly and answer Caiaphas' question honestly: 'What do you think?'

Mt26v67-68 'Nothing is more destructive to a human personality than a slap in the face. It is so humiliating, so demeaning, so deeply dehumanising. It destroys something very basic to our personhood. But our wounded Healer understands. He knows what it is to be slapped in the face. He is touched with the feelings that arise in you from that hurt...He understands.' - David Seamands in 'healing for damaged emotions'. Seamands emphasises Christ's knowing/understanding our infirmities & woundedness, having lived through his own, as  key to the healing of our own damaged emotions. Hb4v15-16: 'for we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathise with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are -yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy & grace in our time of need.'

Mt26v69-70 Our fishy fisherman, lumbering with a broad accent, now twitching by the fire, nervously awkwardly. With tragi-comic pantomime excess, Peter, the hammy actor affects a not-so-cunning disguise of extreme ignorance. Who was this girl that she could so addle our Peter? A crucial question, for we live in such a courtyard. What is London, if not a huddling round the fire of the High Priest? Who are Londoners if not such servant girls as these? Who is this girl? Some enfant terrible? Lolita? Dirty Diana? Some femme fatale agent of the system? Or most likely, a nothingy naive innocent who merely has a mouth-of-babes and the eyes to other our duplicity and false confidence? If she is such, and you are such as Peter, then you are surrounded, you could be found out by anyone, and you should be afraid everything, and you will live a life constructed around concealment, omission and denial. But see, Peter changes after Pentecost Ac2v14. We live after Pentecost, unafraid.

Mt26v71-72 Patterns of behaviour. Habits are increasing harder to break, mindsets increasingly harder to shift. Once denied, it is easier for the mind to cling to the unconscious justifications & fears and to deny again, and louder, than to reconsider, refocus, realign, readopt. Habits are hard to break because they are underpinned by deep fears, and they are a double hardness in requiring both the turning around from the path you are on, and the choosing of a new path. A conversion is needed, otherwise its like treking back up a steep hill, your body will want to keep going down, you'll go back to your denials even though you don't want to and you don't know why. A conversion is needed, a renewing of the mind, you must become a new creation, and this must be founded on a revelation of the truth and love of the Christ-reality, perhap's sometimes through peter's v75 bitter tears. So help me God.

Mt26v73-74 Oh Peter. Swearing and cursing is a funny thing, the Matrix's Merovingian expresses it thus: "Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'enculer ta mère. It's like wiping your arse with silk." Exactly, but why? Why the fuck aye? Verbal violence is in view here, beyond proscribing blasphemy Ex20v7, and beyond ῬΑΚA -  the barbed invocation forbidden by Jesus in Mt5v22 and beyond letting-your-yes-be-yes Jm5v12, how should we then swear? I would vote not at all, but then, what is swearing and cursing? Some help is found by considering the context for Peter's motives for weaponised vocabulary. He, the country mouse, is now a cornered animal, caught out by the mannered urban sophisticates in the courtyard who pour scorn on the lisp of a provincial Galilean accent. Seeing his claim's weakness, his cultural uneducation, his naive unimperial unRoman vulnerable Personalism, they are playing with him. Swearing, in this case (and many), is an ornamental flourish of obscenity to add leverage to Peter's claim. This exercise deflects the emphasis of the claim from its substance to its style and thus swearing is a crisis of faith in the thing uttered - an exercise of power and masking. This afternoon with P, when he asks about Christianity's tricky parts, I may not veer into such explicit denial and cursing but the temptation to deflect by humour manifests the same faithless forgetting that Christianity is folly, offensive, unPC, unclean and uncool. I should expect to be baited, tried and shamed, but to do so unashamed, undefensive with a gentleness and Ph4v8 vocab. For, while I worship dead washedup underdog, I worship the only one who rose again with power. Christianity may be a crutch, but in so far as it is the only sufficient crutch, why swear?

Mt26v75 
The death unto bitterness,
& the bitterness unto death.
Beauty from ashes? 
From this mess?
Flowers bloom,
as we confess.
Resurrection hope,
in this distress.

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Mt25v1-2 Some were wise & some were foolish. 'wisdom & insight' said the girl on the tube. How can I be wise & not foolish? Thinking against a background of proverbs these last few days that there is no magic bullet for wisdom. The Pr1v7 fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, this is the foundation, the necessary condition. But the practice of wisdom involves many things in many contexts, this is why proverbs often seems like such a jumble of thoughts. Wisdom is concerned with sleeping eating building working neighbouring debating cultivating emotions & hundreds more. Pertinently for Matthew's 10 wise & foolish, wisdom concerns planning, Pr27v12. Scottish Widows' breathtaking advertising campaign in Oxford Circus tries to latch onto this: 'life is good/better/inspiring/complete when you have a plan.' No, the plan will not save you, but the wise woman plans ahead. Spirit we ask for good planning.

Mt25v3-4 Light metaphors continue. Here we consider fuel for the fire: the momentary moment of peak oil vs the sustainable faith of 'slow but sure combustion'. If you are to 'let your light so shine..' Mt5v16 What is your fuel? How are you going to keep the lights on? How are you going to keep the flame alive? Dear twenty-somethings, there is no reason to believe that every subsequent season after this one will not be harder: you will yet be enmortgaged, you will yet be married, yet have children, yet be empty-nested, yet be as Tony, yet be sans teeth and sans everything. What then? How are you hoping to keep on keeping on? What have you laid up, patterned in, rhythmed through your lifestyle? Is your faith running on non-renewable fuel? Are your good works powered by adrenaline and caffeine? Cometh the hour, cometh the fuel poverty: what is in your tank? The Christian is a vessel, a container, a would-be reservoir stored up in Heidegger's jug, in a jar of clay 2Cor4v7, within a temple containering the Holy Spirit 1Cor6v19-20. By contrast with the hypocrites of surface, image and Baudrillard's ecstatic 'communication', you are to be depthed deeply, a well of potential, filled to over flowing. Holy Spirit, please fill Phil and keep on filling, lest he burn out.

Mt25v5-6 on waiting for the bridegroom, Is62 - because you will be given a new name: Sought Out, Delighted In. This is the promise to cling to for my healing, and where i am angry and weary that i am not yet healed, and would like to fall asleep, God tells me not to stop demanding of him: Is62v7 do not let God have any rest until you are fully restored, fully whole, fully healed. Keep So3v2 looking for the One loved & longed for, (for Dt30 the lord is your life). Ask the watchmen & women, you you try to keep watch, as you try to stay awake. It is God who Is62v6 made you to watch and not stay silent at the first. 

Mt25v7-8 'trimming the wick' this morning with a bit of self-examination, house-keeping and taking-stock of your salvation: are you? How are you? You.. Run dry? v8 'give us your oil' Alas, the oil of salvation is non-transferable, no man can die for another, you can't travel on your parent's passport any more. Christianity is accused, the reformation in particular, by Lynn White in his environmental critique, of pathological individualism. Rather, correctly understood, Christianity's personalist understanding of the human person is its glory. It is on the basis of your specific agency that you can participate delightfully in the wedding feast: there is no pew-fodder, no wage-slaves, no hangers-on, no also-rans. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a mob, and not a mass (of Buck-Morss' modernity), (and thus we don't believe in mass housing.) Unlike tribal notions of 'us', ontologically collectivised notions of a generalised humanity, *you* are not saved in general. You are saved in particular, you are picked out as a bride, you are cherished specifically, because you are face-to-facing with Jesus. When community is framed as the antidote to individualism, by means of 'Ubuntu' ('I am because we are..') - a notion popular in this networked age - there is a real danger that this over-compensation smuggles in a dissolution of personhood. Dear facebookers, community organisers, workaholic team players, find a moment for silence and solitude to check your oil level, today, before it is too late.

Mt25v9-10 the wise said no. Basics on boundaries and principles of giving, needed in such a time as this. Sacrificial giving does not mean spreading the oil so thin between everyone that no-one has quite enough & everyone burns out. God gives infinitely, but doesn't make us infinite. God will always require of us wisdom's difficult task of managing finite resources. Know when to keep your oil, to burn brightly, to bless best. Real life is harder, of course, true generosity will cost you, no mistake, but as a burning bright rather than a burning out. So, dear heart, sometimes 'no' is a gift from God.

Mt25v11-12 'I do not know you.' Horror and terror. 'I do not know you.' Eternally and infinitely unbeknown, jilted and spurned without limit or measure. What is it to be known? What is it to be known and then not? It has interested me that 'know' functions euphemistically both in Hebrew's yada (Gn4v1) and Greek's eginōsken (Mt1v25) (perhaps derivatively). Although the word here is in fact oida (Gk), the idea that 'knowing' finds an analogue in intercourse is yet profound. Knowing and being beknown are not mere 'knowing-about', nor even intimate-familiarity-with, rather, it is a decisive act: a perpetually active, covenentally singular, vulnerable act. Now withheld. Is it better to have loved and lost? We are the lost, now rebeloved. Known and loved. Blameless and beloved. If only we would let him.

Mt25v13-14 on being given a property to steward, a timely one. What parable are our lives told and telling with this house question? Last night, a picture of a house inside the biggest tree trunk, like the kingdom of God, in which the birds make their nests. Yes to a vision, yes to writing it down, yes to stewardship that multiplies. The kingdom of heaven is like this. 

Mt25v15-16 How many talents did you get? It is a test. To whom much is given, much will be required Lk12v48. But, God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your ability 1Co10v13. You have enough, you are enough, God's grace to grace is more than enough. Whereas, the popular myth of scarcity is murder to the energetic having-dominion which would work out into creative entrepreneurship, it makes us hoarders and hiders, Pharoahs and monopolisers (http://goo.gl/4dS1fW). If I want to change the world with what I have, I need to change my attitude to what I have. I have exactly the right amount, for exactly the call I'm called to, to bring exactly the financial/social return which God expects from me. No more, no less. Or as my boy Lecrae gives his two cents: Why stay the same for the change, let’s talk ‘bout change for a change.

Mt25v17-18 What are you hiding? Why are you hiding? We've been hiding since the first garden, we've been hiding from God, we've been hiding from each other, we've been hiding from ourselves. As hider - anxious ashamed guilty fearful hateful. As hidden from - aching hurting confused raging lonely. Hiding makes us strangers. I still remember the woman at the Mary Ward Centre telling me about the breakup of her marriage: 'we were two strangers after all'. Hiding is a brokenness and a choice. The freedom course places telling a narrative (exposure) and moving out of denial (owning your feelings, your story, reality, responsibility, the lot the master left) as a needful part of the healing process. 'How long will you hide your face from me?' says the one who loves. How long will you hide your talent your gift yourself in the ground? Oh. Jesus sought me when a stranger. So. Please, please, don't hide. Seek.

Mt25v19-20 How long is Christianity? ~ Not like a piece of string. Christianity is not nebulous, it is always and certainly long enough to get invested, long enough to sow seeds and wait for a return. 'After a long time..' may sound like a nothing phrase, but it is the affirmation (1) We need to be in this for the long haul, but also that, (2) God knows that doubling your money will take a long time. Perhaps I am pressing this parable too far, but I derive that our God is a patient investor, He isn't impressed by high stakes and quick fixes, He is not anxious for an aggressively quick return on investment, God loves a steady rate earned through faithful stewardship. It's not that simple though. There are no risk-free investments. There are, but that is not what we are about. I am struck this morning by the 3 options in this parable: 1. put your talents to work; 2. bury them in the ground; 3. put them in a bank. Option 2 is bitter, angry and passive-aggressive. The risk averse option 3 would have you join a commercial firm, take a pew, tread water, wait to die, and just don't do too much sinning. Option 1 is the right answer. Option 1 is risky. You are risking your father's money. He has considered the risks. He loves you yet unconditionally. Therefore go.

Mt25v21-22 the second-personal address i long to hear, though too often it has been connected in my experience with conditionality, performance, pride. Let me bear Gl5v22-33 the spirit-fruits of goodness & faithfulness, of joy & all the rest. That is, fill me first, holy spirit, rushing waterfall, comforter, helper, parakletos, advocate. Fill me first with yourself, that goodness may not only follow me, but follow.

Mt25v23-24 As goes your theology of God, so follows your attitude to stewardship or not, your motives for multiplication or not, and your capacity for joy or not. One commentary has this tidy summary of the 'hard man' rendering of God's character: "...'exacting what was impracticable, and dissatisfied with what was attainable.' Thus do men secretly think of God as a hard Master, and virtually throw on Him the blame of their fruitlessness." The sins of embittered non-multiplication and solipsistic passivity are two of the most invisible, most legitimised, most comforting, most deathly. It is ironic the compensatory technology invented to enable an escape from a illiberal, evolutionistic, 'hard man' conception of an negligent ultimate reality founded by the absent fathers of impersonal modernity. God is not such.You can fight with God, but he's a lover not a fighter.

Mt25v25-26 So i was afraid. But with words the spirit of fear has been rebuked. 2Pt1v7 For God gives us a spirit not of fear but of power & love & self-control. Or translated, a spirit of courage, of love & of a sound mind. In Christ I have all the resources to understand that I don't need to act out on my anxieties, that God has designed me to be courageous. (thank you God, for these words spoken.) & as 2Pt1 continues v14 by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us guard the good deposit entrusted to you. To risk mixing metaphors, but reiterating that the spirit must come first, I must receive the Holy Spirit's fierce love courage understanding in order to guard fight-for invest multiply, even a little bit, with faltering steps towards a lot. Come Holy Spirit.

Mt25v27-28 True evil prevails when good people do nothing, and even giving money to the bankers is better than that. There is no reason to believe that bankers in that day were any more ethical those responsible for our current economic predicament - the 'interest' gained from the Jewish bankers suggests they were disobeying law against usury anyways. Jesus purpose here is polemic, intending to illustrate the scale of the absurdity of the contradiction implicit in my apathy, when I have such a good God. Basically, if you are going to call God a bad man, then at least be consistent and be a bit harsh yourself with what he's given you, go on, put your money away in Lockheed and BAE, at least they'll give a return on it. Go on. Don't do nothing. Risk doing something good, with the good gifts your good father has entrusted you with. He has and he does. This is the adventure.

Mt25v29-30 On the haves having more & have-not having taken away, on virtuous & vicious cycles, this statement of Jesus is not so strange, for life begets more life, while lies beget more lies. The difference between running through the park of crocuses as Paul's keep on keeping on, you've seen nothing yet c'mon more more more! and scrivener's running down anorexia hill, the weight of sin & sickness destroying more & more as it spirals. The starting point of the spiral is what matters, what kernel, what seed? Is it the spirit of fear? Or is it the spirit of love, power, self-control? Come Holy Spirit, come today.

Mt25v31-32 Be more sheep? Should we? Ovine to haedine, caprine to hircine, in the end times there are binary lines drawn. But for now. Think you a better breed? Born of a better seed? Give then to those in need v35-6. Is it helpful to ponder a caricature of benign sheep, set against the goats of wrath? Maybe. Jesus is trying to conjure something from this pasture, to evoke a dichotomy, to draw us to his Kingdom way, where the slave of all is rewarded, where a prince's inheritance v34 is given to the least and least likely. Strangely, as tools for this metaphorical task, sheep and goats are blandly much of a muchness, all fluffy four legs grazing in the same pasture.. Such are we all at a glance. But some of us know we are loved by the King, some of us know the inheritance that awaits, some of us have found license to give ourselves away. Sheepliness is belovedness, it may be invisible and upside-down, but it makes all the difference, both in the now and the not yet. And where is it found? Before the throne of glory. Seek and savour the glory, this Lent.

Mt25v33-34 'come & possess what I've prepared for you in advance': words we hear in order to speak them forward. As we go deeper into Jesus' hard words on the imperative of hospitality we remember that it is framed first by God's radical hospitality. We welcome because he first welcomed us. He has been preparing grace for us since the creation of the world. God welcomes even where we choose not to enter in. & so as we learn to say more & more boldly to others (as this passage demands) 'come & possess what has been prepared for you', we do it because God has said it to us, resoundingly, & because through God's spirit, we get to 2Pt1v3 participate in the divine nature. Christ the great host, make us hostlier we pray.

Mt25v35-36 Thusly has Sarah been God (v40) (or an angel Hb13v2) to Lisbon in her reception of hospitality from strangers and the healthcare system.. Timely, no? Oh for eyes to see eternity permeating these everyday encounters, and not also to stray into at least two obvious heresies: [1] access to heaven is compensation for charitable works [2] God is only found in the human other. Everything seems to hang on a nuance of emphasis, why does Jesus do that? ~ except that it really is that close to call. Blink and you'll miss it. [1] Grace alone through faith alone, ought to lead to such energetic gratitude that, uninterrogated, a bystander might be tempted to call it salvation by works. [2] Without setting it against his transcendence, I dare you, to go and risk overemphasising God's immanence, he really is as close as breathing, as near as hands and feet.

Mt25v37-38 Not really sure what to do with the righteous' professed unknowing. Being told to be (& hence to be intentionally, consciously) unselfconscious is oft the recipe for knots & tangles. One can consciously identify & try to give over motives of 3rd-person knowingness, of concern for the way the thing presents, perhaps. Further, we ask that to our faith is added goodness. This spirit-fruit speaks of the integrity of our virtue, if we have yet given ourselves to the total ontological change of new creation, where christlikeness cannot but flow out: jp's 'if they cut you open what would you bleed.' Come holy spirit, change me all the way through, through christ, amen. 

Mt25v39-40 '..the least of these' [1] in what does their leastness consist and [2] why is it important? [1] A provocative interpretation considers that the leasting refers to the brotherliness of the brother helped - what ever you did for the most un/anti-christian 'brother', most unfollowing follower, most obstreporous brother devoid of philia, you did for me. However, 'least', more straightforwardly, refers to the 'low income' or similar as a measure of a lack in the capacity to reward or reciprocate assistance given.  [2] On any given scale, if you begin at the bottom, no one is excluded - God's heart is for such inclusivity. God may permeate the whole scale, but I would argue that God's presence begins at the bottom, so, begin with those, the least, the last and the lost, the down-trodden, the back-slidden, the undermined, the bottom rung, the long forgotten, the overwhelmed. This seems straight forward. However, 'least' is superlative, and there are always easier cases to fix that the certified 'least'. Serving mild needs is more expedient often more rewarding. Would that God graded us on a curve, and assessed us on society's neglected middle. Seeking to improve the lot of the modal voter is a politician's game, raising the mean income, playing with statistical averages.. God cares for the specific and unabstract, the lost sheep, the last to get picked, the least of these. How are your least? Begin there.

Mt25v41-42 How to take this seriously, without panic or unhelpful self-flagellation (which leads to grace assuaging panic, but then oft to skip the seriousness). How to look squarely at moral demandingness and the problem of an egoistic 'moral responsibility' that this passage could elicit? I think this passage needs to be understood as spoken to the body of Christ as a whole. I alone cannot house every homeless and feed every hungry, but between us - that is, the church in the world - we can, actually, & I must take seriously my part to play. The structure of justice is necessarily multipersonal. So in order to fulfill Jesus' terrifying command here, the church must communicate, delegate, task, equip & demand of itself, humbly. What overall justice vision do i see the church pursuing? Do I hold it in my mind? The local church the hope of the world? & where then am I church-hands, feeding?

Mt25v43-44 Why say again in the negative what was made clear in the positive? Because Christianity is more-than. More-than damage limitation, more than brownie points. More than commission of bad things, Jesus is concerned about the omission of good things: through negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault. Father forgive. Where we have left undone those things which we ought to have done. Father forgive. These are the parts of the bible which are so much more challenging than its prohibitions. Where we have wasted time bickering. Father forgive.

Mt25v45-46 Not-helping forges a certain type of relationship, a relationship of death, we are told here, rather than a relationship of life. Dt30: 'I am setting before you today life & death, blessings & curses, says the Lord...Choose life.' The definitions of helping & not-helping are tricky, aye, but this is the path that love & wisdom is asked to tread. I am setting before you faces of others, choose life! Choose life-life, choose the way of life, which is the great wave of restoration that is the work of the kingdom of God already in play. Know the truth that the other's best can be your highest joy in the economy we get to operate in. Show me more of this, I pray, make it more real in my life. Choose to join in, choose to play now, this is really living, choose to help, choose life! 

texting matthew twenty four

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Mt24v1-2 Prayer: Sarah points something out to Jesus. Jesus pays attention. Jesus points something out to Sarah, related but unexpected. Hermeneutically hand-in-hand He & i, He leading.

Mt24v3-4 'When?' When's it going to end? How long, oh Lord? Jesus says: the end is not near, it's here. Gradually, constantly, increasingly, the kingdom is a happening. We live in the death throes of a terminal condition, the closing chapter of an apocalyptic volume. Look around you, this is what the end of the world looks like. Make note however, Christianity is not the only creed to frame life eschatologically. It is a true truth, powerful and emotive. So, beware. The endiness of the end gives rise to the nihilism, hedonism, canned-goods-stacking, fossil-fuel-burning, reckless, rapture-ous, escapism of secular and religious consumerism. Beware the saviours you seek in the context of calamity.

'..lead astray'
Astray, awry, asunder,
A drift, a thought, a wander,
Misspent, distraught, a blunder,
We trade in what we long for.

Who leads whom astray and how? Who? False Christs. Whom? Seekers of salvation. How? My thesis in this text is that the force of the fault of false teachers lies in the longing we have for their message. I don't need Moonies or Mormons, sufficient for me is the comfort i find in more mundane escapes. Oh Phil, beware the saviours you make, the shelter you take and the sanctification you fake. There is but one who can sufficiently save, shelter and sanctify. Tis not I, nor my iPhone.

Mt24v5-6 Battles near & far, says the GNB. Battles deep & big. Battles, fighting, conflict, incongruence. Battles between angels & demons, between the false messiahs & the true, between good & evil: the battleline, Solzhenitsyn's human heart. My heart. Battles so near that they're under the skin, i squirming & screaming to try to root them out. This whole chapter is a strange one. In this world you will have troubles? But. Take heart. Christ has. Overcome.

Mt24v7-8 Nation against nation. Wars are. Quintessential false teaching subtly pretends wars aren't. And so equips no-one for ministry in the context of battle. Do I? Does small group's crisps & wine speak a 'peace, peace..'? Or does it ready us with ruthless rationing and first aid skills for front-line service of a world being torn apart? v8 'birth pangs' as Rm8, a midwifery mentality is the antidote to escape or despair in  the face the world's anguish.

Mt24v9-10 The war all around looks like hate, looks like betrayal. Hate & betrayal paradigm exemplars of un-love. Active desire to maim, indifference to the end-in-itself of personhood. Both present temptations of the war under the skin. But reading 1Cor13v4-8 with uncynical new eyes. Love. Love will save the world. Love will save me. Love is so gentle & fierce & unnatural & unexpected. Love will change all plans into kingdom-building. So i ask that all these plans & words & seeming good intentions spoken this weekend get swept up in Love, changed by Love. By patience & kindness & endurance. Wrung out of jealousy, conceit, pride, ill-manners, selfishness, irritability & record-of-wrongs-keeping. Love that delights in the truth & so admits of arrest. Let us be lovers. The greatest of these.

Mt24v11-12 'the love of many will grow cold' - a more realistic claim than 'Christians make better lovers'? Do I? Jesus might but I'm still too cool, too chilled out, too lukewarm. Where is the salt to grit the pavements of this one's heart? To find love in a lawless place, eschew the glib and the ironic, break the ice with something warmer. To make a christian connection, catch on fire and let them come and watch you burn. So to speak.

Mt24v13-14 'the one who holds out', 'the one who endures'. The 'But' beginning this sentence constrasts endurance with a lack/loss of love. & Love 1Cor13v7 bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. How does one keep going well, keep holding things up, together, out? This in my mind this morn before reading, & a picture of a boat's deep-down ballast. The ballast is Joy, i thought, & the ballast is Love.A

Mt24v15 'caused' causation. What abomination causes desolation? What sort of parliamentary bill causes flooding? Daniel speaks of such difficult things Dn9v26-27. And rightly does Matthew add the strange parenthesis 'reader, be sure to understand what this means' ie. don't be claiming trite causalities. And yet, what am I to do with causation in a supernatural universe, how am I to understand judgement and its right foreshadowing? Super hard verses these.

Mt24v16 Literal explosive evangelism. Go! Shake the dust off. Go! Go tell it on the mountains. Go! This is a Flight from the City (Johann Johannsson), but play it in a major key. Contrary to the city fanatics, the Kellers and the Driscolls, sometimes you've got to abandon the city. Sometimes the city can only be subverted from without. Sometimes we need to be more Anabaptist, more Amish, more agrarian. So leave. But don't leave the city unchanged.

Mt24v17-18 like Lk12v16-21 building barns unto death, running for one's things, one's cloak, in the face of death (& we always are being-towards-death) reveals the Mt6v23 misapprehension, 6v21 mistreasuring by the heart. & i do just want my cloak. If i can just be snuggly & not too harassed & have a hot chocolate it will all be okay. This is often my practical eschatology, combating the flipside of a scratchy anxiety. So with buying a house, & dreaming a dream: we could do it anxiously, to try to save ourselves. Or we could do it as a denial of the need to be saved, as an investment in our own brand of Lk12v19 snuggliness. But Jesus says: Mt6v16 look at the birds. Look at the birds of the air, look at the wild flowers. I'm not a metaphor - go and look, & surrender your cloak for the kind you Lk15v22 can't buy.

Mt24v19 'Alas the pregnant in these days..' Do you feel this? Contraception: a symptom of the end of the world? It's an act of faith to be fruitful and multiply? McCarthy's The Road shows we shouldn't and Children of Men shows a world where we don't. And we, many of us, believe them. Biological & spiritual childbearing is too great a burden in the face of calamity but what if it's not the end? What if this is the beginning of all thing new? Go, multiply.

Mt24v20 'Pray that your flight may not be on a Sabbath..' See Jesus assumes the Sabbath is no day for long journeys. Do you? I flew Singapore-Manila on a Sunday wondering all flight, 'Am I part of the problem..?' The only day left in London that gives any hint of what sabbath could be is Dec 25th. Imagine. Imagine the profound consequences to urbanism of staying put, sitting down, unplugging, neighbouring not TfLing, street-partying. Oh be chill and know.

There used to be much more of a taboo on Sunday travel. Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' mentions Sunday travel as an indicator of impiety in a suspicious character. The working class Worcester lady, born around 1900, whom I visited as a schoolgirl, had 'Sunday travel is bad/unlucky' in her mental furniture. 

Mt24v21 There will never be a greater tribulation? Are we talking about Jerusalem here? What's going on? Nobody seems quite sure. Carson says that while there have been greater numbers of deaths and desolations under regimes, pointedly the Holocaust, the Fall of Jerusalem is the most devastating occurrence to have happened in human history to a particular city. I cannot say. In its speculation, at least, prompts back to the conversation on Could London Implode? If not the torment of widespread slaughter, then up to what desolation does one hold one's city in fear and trembling? If there's something in these words to speak to the way we make and love this city I ask for revelation within revelation.

Mt24v22 Less a particularly spooky intervention, more the reality that God draws to all things to an end, to begin again. God cuts short. God summons us to his throne. God cuts short our sin and our suffering. You will never have time tomorrow to prepare. Rompre.

Mt24v23-24 Are we nearly there yet? Have we suffered long enough? This extremely-advertised age manifests exactly the crescendo of false promises that we should expect. You have been forewarned, be then also forearmed, be unbelieving, Jesus says. Sony budgeted $100m in 2010 for its 'make.believe' campaign - that is a lot of smoke and a lot of mirror, targeting the entitlement of an age where, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. With wealth comes the exponential increase in the availability of substitute saviours, premature happy endings, creature comforts. Subtly I seek an out, I expect it easy, I distract myself devising cunning self-salvations. Grumpy entitlement: This is the future, where is my jetpack? I make saviours of the gifted, the eloquent, the comforting, the humanistic, ready to hand, already-now heavens. Dear Phil be forearmed in Christ against anything advertised.

Mt24v25 Foretelling. For all the worrying that it's a problem if God knows the future, or how God communicates outside time. For all the need to perhaps re-emphasise the God-in-time to counter the de-emphasis over time. Still. to Stop. to Remember. That God is bigger than time, somehow. Christ alpha and omega, beginning and end. Prophecy reminds us that even in the present itself God fills the past the present and the future, and loves to whisper, flash and look with eyes that contain the bigger story.

Mt24v26 The deserted place or the hidden place of esoteric false messiahs is contrasted with the visible-to-all lightning of v27. Light metaphors yo. This is what God is working towards, this is where the kingdom wants and will go: total exposure, total light. 

Mt24v27 Always a bolt from the blue for the broken. Lightning carries all the strength of other light metaphors Mt5v14 (city on a hill), Is51v4 (light to nations), Ps119v105 (lamp to feet), 2Cor4v4 (gospel of light), Col1v12 (kingdom of light), Eph5v8 (children of light), Jn8v12 (I am the light). But lightning carries more than this - it speaks of that moment of light's production, where vast unseen swells of atmosphere spark electric touching ground.

Mt24v28 Vultures to carrion. Commentaries commenting on commentaries make much of the multiple interpretations of this metaphor. What should be conjured? Birdiness? Featheriness? Speediness? Paracitism? The body broken? The Roman eagle? I consider there is a simple spatial/diagrammatic parallel. Vultures and lightning are both icons of a certainty linking events in the air to events on the ground plane at a distance to an observer. So lift your eyes up. More than that. Consider the kingdom as a van de Graaff generator: ministry now, in the laying-on of hands, passes on a positive charge. A time is coming, however, when we will see the Tesla coil of heaven touching earth: a permanent visible axial located discharge of God's constant blazing energetic presence to earth. At that time it will be as an ultimate light-to-light(ning) for some and the aroma of death-to-death for vultures 2Cor2v16?

Your text makes me think of Psalm 29. The awesome terror of God as encapsulated in his stormy cedar breaking power that causes the whole earth to cry GLORY and yet, somehow, simultaneously, this same terrible power speaks to his people of his peace. Aromas of life and death indeed.

Mt24v29-30 No sun or moon or stars? This morning's golden sky but a shadow of Christ's glory, for Rev21v23-24 when all things are made new, the lamb will be our only light. For we 1Cor13v12 now see dimly & in part, but when we see the Real face-to-face, all the light metaphors will fall away, perhaps, the blinding beauty of each will be understood fully, where now we grope in analogies and whispers, then shall we know fully, as we are fully known.

...Why does Piper's stained glass of the heavenly Jerusalem [St Peter's West Firle The Tree of Life, (John Piper, 1985)] have a sun and a moon in it? Why does it keep appearing? Where do these metaphors begin and end?

Mt24v31 Blud, when you hear them sirens coming: we are the diaspora, a dispersal running. We are spread abroad, sent to spread abroad something, news of Jesus coming that you'd all be humming. Look busy, get busy.. and get ready for the next episode. Hold up. .. I am struck in this by the phenomenon of premature gathering. Centripetal forces act on us constantly, settling, Babeling, mega-churching, urbanising.. Can you hear the siren of eternity in the distance.. Run then, with a right restlessnes, the race marked out, to the four corners, make sure they all know.

Mt24v32 Arboreal dendroidal parabolic realism: we live in a reality that is budding.. 'He took on our frailty, He took on all-comers, To turn all our winters to glorious summers.'

Mt24v33-34 A Padraig poem that often surfaces from deep: quietly now / for she is very near / and though she doesn't frighten easily / you must know by now / that you do//...very near, the three syllables that inspire awe & wonder, fear & trembling. Very near, just by the gates, the one i long for, Ps42 thirsty. & when they ask 'where is your God?', i will say, with wondered remembering & renewed responsibility, 'very near'. Often this my chief lack & forgetting. I don't now the correct scholarly commentary on v34 but it serves as a meditation on the near & now, he is near to me in my generation, he is at the gate of my life, invited in and very near. 

Mt24v35-36 'What do you do when you don't know?' asks Hoffman's character in the opening sequence of Doubt. Jesus knew a not-knowing. His finitude during his incarnation is in view here, and we learn that incomplete knowledge is not insufficient. The boldness of his ministry, the strength of his leadership, the power of his preaching, his faithfulness unto death, his prophetic insights into unspoken thoughts, were not contingent on omniscience and, thus, are available to us as finite knowers. What was it that Jesus *did* know? He knew he was beloved Mt3v17, he knew the bible's commands Mt4v4,7,10, and it's promises 4v16. What do you know? What are you doing with what you know? Bertrand Russell complained to God of 'not enough evidence..'. There is a way of life that 'sees in part and knows in part' 1Co13v9 and yet has saving knowledge 1Ti2v4. What do I know? What do they know? Therefore, go.

Deut 29:29 of course x 

Mt24v37-38
maritime analogies
lest i forget.
Holy Spirit flood us,
that when the floods come up
it is You
we're swept away in.
Amen.

Mt24v39-40 'knew not' 'they were unaware' What would it look like to be aware, Dawlish, what could you have done to have been kept from being swept away? Noah built an ark. What should I build in my life? And what should I build my life in? For a flood is coming certainly, while storms batter Britain now, we are yet antediluvian. When the tumult of life breaks over me, what are my canned goods, where is my liferaft? Do I find them in Christ? When the skies are clear and the ground is dry, am I storing canned goods, am I inflating my liferaft? Am I doing so in Christ? Do I call others to join me, have I welcomed them in? People will think I'm silly. People thought Noah was silly. Even in the now there is v40's binary distinction, between the silly who walk on water, and those who are skeptical of impossible things.

Mt24v41-42 Stay alert & awake, but don't be anxious. Like yesterday's thought, be passionately in love, but don't compulsively Gal5v15 bite & devour. Except that its really hard to know the difference from the inside. Impossible often. Only with God are these things possible, I am not able to calibrate myself. Please, oh Christ, do a work in me, on my ardour & awakeness, my freedom, my sleep. Refine me with love, amen.

Mt24v43-44 Ready or not? 'erchetai' (Gk) - Jesus comes. He comes, now (and then), here (and hereafter). There is a nowness to his coming, which Mt25v40 will make much more of. Jesus comes in the face of the other, in the now, in the needs of the least of these, all the time. Are you ready? Am I ready? Ready to give an answer? Expecting the unexpected guest? The household that is ready for Jesus coming has its pantry stocked for the stranger, knows its first aid, has prepared for the eventuality of the poor you will always have with you. Are they with you? I take for granted that waiting-on-the-Lord is active - not one of hibernation. But further, it is not sufficient to be event-based, Jesus doesn't wait for City Lights, his needs aren't always on Sundays, you cannot set an alarm for this break in, the Kingdom breaking in.

Mt24v45-46 Feeding, maybe importantly literally as metaphorically. I was struck by Sara Miles' autobiography 'Take this Bread', in which she became a Christian after taking communion, then started feeding people obsessively. Those with responsibility for the flock are to feed His sheep. With these babies it is the act of feeding that constitutes a primary care, and though one cannot live my bread alone, by mere bread, there is much bread that is not mere bread, feeding that feeds more than the some of its parts, no mere bodies, but embodied souls, who take the bread and drink the wine, for Christ's sake.

Mt24v47-48 This side of eternity, we steward time. In the film 'In Time' Timberlake's character is advised to "slow down to blend in with the rich.." In just such an age of 'killing time', we steward time. Are you loving each day as if it's the last day? Whom are you loving each day? We steward time. v45 Being ready is readying others, feeding others, giving them the time of day. v47 'all his possessions' Christians are rich; even now, the eternal life, the Sabbath, is our wealth in the currency of a scarce resource, therefore be generous with your time, urgently. v48 'My master is delayed..' What do you do if your train is delayed? Tonight's tube strike is a chance to consider time, a chance to fill a minute with sixty seconds of a different distance run. We steward time, and every moment is a chance to love well and speak Jesus. Teach me to number my days Ps90v12, like a glowing clock on my arm.

Mt24v49-50 Violent thoughts & behaviour towards others, the compulsion of comfort eating, the escapism of drunkenness - all are retreats into the self, a turning away from reality, a surrender to instinct, habit & blindness, rather than the surrender to the God of light. Praying always & still that Jesus the carpenter re-works re-grooves our minds into new creations, that we don't run to our go-to places, our reactive unkind places. Praying this over all of today, for myself & those closeby. We are seen, & as such our instincts do not get to win. Rather love, love wins. Come Lord Jesus.

Mt24v51 Hypocrisy, faciality and the end times. A lot about face in this little verse, bear with me. Hypocrisy is fundamentally about the face, two-facedness: hypocrite: hupo creno (Gk) (the 'actor' 'beneath' [the mask]). It is the face beneath the face of the masked masquerader. We are all such. Veiling our shame. Branding ourselves. Overcladding a tired facade. Putting on a brave face. One day, however, we will, with unveiled faces 2Co3v18, see him face-to-face 1Co13v12, Re22v4 just as Jacob saw him face-to-face Gn32v30.. How? Jesus describes a eschatological face-lift, there is a cutting apart to reveal a gnashing of teeth and weeping tear ducts - like a muscular anatomy diagram in my mind's eye. The Christian life at the end, and in progress, is no saving face, it is a saving-from the faces we have adopted, saving by such a surgical de-facing. Is there, then, or will there be, such a thing as a Christian physiognomy?  Lewis speaks of the 'Till We Have Faces' face as one which is unmasked, speaking with its own voice - so certainly there is an unadornment and authenticity, but further, Moses' face was radiant Ex34v35, and Stephen's was as the 'face' of an angel Ac6v15? Today, tomorrow, what are you facing? Who are you face-to-facing? How is your face?