Blessed Are the Poor.

Blessing, Jesus 0

It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor” – period. In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of “in spirit” is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ’s blessing, we must identify an area of need and cry out for grace from there. If we think we have no area of weakness, need, or poverty, we essentially have no need for Jesus. This is why in the Book of Revelation Jesus condemns the people in the church of Laodicea for arrogantly confessing, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” They were essentially saying, “Thank you very much, Jesus, but I really don’t need you right now because I’m not poor.” So be it. Jesus has no blessing for them. The grace of Christ is perfected in weakness and poverty, not in strength and wealth. As Mary said of Messiah in her prophetic Magnificat, “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” This is the spirit of the first beatitude – and to the poor it is beautiful.

–Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World, p. 190-191

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 16, 2025

Becoming Lowly

Calling, Community, Generosity, Jesus 0

On the last night of his life, at his last supper, Jesus puts into words what we’ve seen throughout the entire Gospel. This is what he’s done in befriending outsiders and outcasts, in seeking to lift up the lowly. He came as a servant-king. Everything we’ve seen to this point in the Gospel is a picture of Jesus doing what finally now he puts into words. He gave himself to love, heal, and care for the broken and hurting. He sought to show mercy and grace to the marginalized and those far from God. He came to see those who were often overlooked or unseen. And if he did that for us, as his disciples this must be our posture and the mission we are called to as well. This is what it means to be his disciple: we follow him, and we lift up the lowly.

Lifting up the lowly requires becoming lowly. Greatness is defined by lowering ourselves and serving others. In our world, this is utterly countercultural, but it is absolutely the culture of the Kingdom.

If the disciples, who spent three years with Jesus, were still focused on status and power at the Last Supper, it should not surprise us that we struggle with those same things at times as well. But nearly every one of the conversations Jesus had over his final week were on this same theme. He encouraged a rich young ruler to lay down the source of his status. He blessed and healed a blind beggar. He befriended a wealthy and powerful tax collector who gave up half of what he had to the poor. He praised the poor widow while castigating the powerful and status-loving religious elite. “The greatest among you must become like a person of lower status and the leader like a servant” (Luke 22:6).

–Adam Hamilton, Luke: Jesus and the Outsiders, Outcasts, and Outlaws, p. 107

Photo: pink Mandevilla flowers, August 6, 2025.

Come to Me, All You Who Are Weary and Burdened

Jesus, Rest 0

I was struck by hearing that Jesus acknowledges our weariness and our burden, friends. Jesus doesn’t judge the burdened one for the burden or the sad one for the sadness or the disappointed one for the disappointment or the brokenhearted one for the grief. Jesus doesn’t say to you, “If you were more faithful, you wouldn’t feel like that! This is your fault – you need more quiet times, you need more work, more Bible studies, more prayer, more YouTube deep dives, more faith, you deserve this suffering, you need to put others first more! Squash those doubts and complexities! Ignore your unanswered questions and quiet devastations.”

Rather, there is a tenderness to Jesus’s words here. God acknowledges, even blesses, your weariness. It turns out that, yes, the yoke has been too heavy. It’s not all in your head.

— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 21

Photo: Columbia River Gorge, June 16, 2025

Breaking Through

God, Jesus, Love, Redemption 0

That’s what we mean when we say Jesus had to die for us. It’s not that he had to literally pay God some price, which makes God appear rather petty and powerless. Is God that unfree to love and forgive? Does God not organically and naturally love what God created? It can’t be true. John Duns Scotus taught that good theology will always keep God free for humanity and humanity free for God. Love can only happen in the realm of freedom, and ever-expanding freedom at that. We pulled God into our way of loving and forgiving, which is always mercenary and tit-for-tat. It was the best any of us could do until we sat stunned before the cross.

Quite simply, until someone dies, we don’t ask bigger questions. We don’t understand in a new way. We don’t break through. The only price that Jesus was paying was to the human soul, so that we could break through to a new kind of God. Most of religious history believed that humanity had to spill blood (human sacrifice or animal sacrifice) to get to God, but, after Jesus, some were able to comprehend that, actually, God was spilling blood to get to us. That reversed the engines of history forever, but the human mind still resists that reversal. It is too good to be true.

— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 79

Photo: Columbia River, June 16, 2025

More Loved Than We Found Them

Acceptance, Compassion, Jesus, Love 0

Honestly, I don’t know if organized Christianity, on balance, is helpful anymore. What I do know is that the compassionate heart of Jesus I find in the stories told about him is helpful – and urgently needed. The world can use more tender-hearted humans, doing what they can to live selflessly, gently, and focused on others – and that’s probably the highest spiritual aspiration we can have: leaving people more loved than we found them. I want to stand with the empathetic souls, no matter where they come from and what they call themselves and who they declare God to be, because that is the most pressing need I see in the world. I want to be with the disparate multitude who believe caring for others is the better path, even if that means never stepping foot in a church building again or doing the hard work of renovating the one that I’m connected to. People who are assailed by the storms of this life don’t need any more heartless, loveless, joyless self-identified saints claiming they’re Christian while beating the hell out of them. They need people who simply give a damn in a way that emulates Jesus, people who see how hard it is to be human and feel burdened to make it a little softer.

–John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 12

Photo: Irises, South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2025

We All Have a Place

Acceptance, Community, God, Jesus, Universalism 0

Over and over again, Jesus shows us the humanity of those we would put into different compartments from ourselves. He reminds us that our fellow brothers, sisters, and siblings are not so easily categorized and separated. To one another, we should not be enemies to be defeated, resources to be exploited, or infidels to be converted. We all belong to one another as one family, and we all belong to God as a heavenly Parent. So it only follows that we would all have a place through God’s gate and at God’s table, no matter how long it takes for us to get there.

–Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 91

Photo: Bluebells at Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 18, 2025

Greater Glory

Atonement, Forgiveness, God, Jesus, Love, Redemption 0

What would have happened if Jesus, in terrible pain on the cross, had commanded an army of angels to come and wipe out his persecutors? What would have happened if Jesus had bought into the violent response of Peter when the Romans came to arrest him? Violence, bloodshed, death, maybe even war, right? But instead, Jesus responded in the opposite way. He commanded Peter to put away his sword and he spoke words of forgiveness from the cross. In so doing, he broke the cycle of violence and reconciled us to God so that we could spend an eternity celebrating and enjoying our restored relationship with a God who loves us. Which brings God more glory – retribution or restoration? I think the answer is obvious.

–Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 99

Photo: Cherry blossoms, South Riding, Virginia, March 28, 2025

The Compassionate Heart of God

Atonement, Compassion, God, Grace, Jesus, Love, Redemption 0

What do I see when I look upon Christ in death with a pierced side? I see that a soldier’s spear has opened a window into the heart of God. As I gaze into the heart of God I discover that there is no wrath, no malice, no threat, no vengeance; only compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Mt 12:34). Jesus dies, not with a curse upon his lips, but with a plea for pardon. To see Christ upon the cross is to see into the very depths of the heart of God. Where once in our distant pagan past we imagined there lurked monstrous intent threatening harm, we now discover there is only tender compassion. On the cross we encounter a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. When we look through the riven side of Christ into the heart of God, we gaze upon a vast cosmos filled with galaxies of grace.

–Brian Zahnd, The Wood Between the Worlds, p. 33

Photo: Cherry blossoms in a heart shape, South Riding, Virginia, March 28, 2025

Go High

Core Value, God, Jesus 0

If our postmodern world seems highly subject to cynicism, skepticism, and what it does not believe in, if we now live in a post-truth America, then we “believers” must take at least partial responsibility for aiming our culture in this sad direction. The best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better. Oppositional energy only creates more of the same. All problem solving must first be guided by a positive and overarching vision.

We must reclaim the Christian project, building from the true starting point of Original Goodness. We must reclaim Jesus as an inclusive Savior instead of an exclusionary Judge, as a Christ who holds history together as the cosmic Alpha and Omega. Then, both history and the individual can live inside of a collective safety and an assured success. Some would call this the very shape of salvation.

–Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, p. 67-68

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 12, 2025

God’s Unrelenting Love

Atonement, God, Jesus, Love, Redemption 0

What Paul is claiming by saying that God put forth Jesus as a hilasterion is that this is proof of God’s righteousness and forbearance (Rom 3:25-26). The cross is not the pre-condition for God’s forgiveness. Rather, it is what proves how unrelenting God’s love is, even for God’s enemies (5:10-11; 8:31-39). And, humanity is being saved, not from God, but from Sin and Death (e.g., 5:12-7:25; cf. 1 Cor 15:55-56). Paul thinks the cross is what God endures in Jesus as God forgives (Rom 4:7), overlooks (3:25-26), and does not account people’s sins (4:8; cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19). The death of Jesus is what God undergoes as he loves his enemies so as to be reconciled to them (5:6-11), which requires God to enter “enemy territory” so to speak.

Paul is essentially saying:

Look at Jesus! God is not your enemy! You are the ones at enmity with God. God is justifying you even though you are ungodly. God has put forth Jesus as a conciliatory votive gift of peace and reconciliation to demonstrate this. Be reconciled to God! God loves you! If God did not spare God’s own Son, then nothing can separate you from the love of God revealed and manifested in Jesus Christ. Jesus eternally stands in the presence of God (like votive gifts stand in temples) interceding for us all.

–Andrew Remington Rillera, Lamb of the Free, p. 268-269

Photo: Snow and frozen lake, South Riding, Virginia, January 6, 2025