Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch), and Saul. (Acts 13:1)

That is a pretty fascinating list of names to start a church with. So let’s do a roll call here.

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We’ll start off with Barnabas. Now, Barnabas we know from earlier in Acts. He’s introduced back in chapter 4, and his real name is Joseph, or in some manuscripts Joses.1 But he’s given the nickname Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, because in his first appearance he sells a plot of land that he owns and brings the proceeds to the church in Jerusalem to share with the poor (Acts 4:36–37).

What’s interesting about Barnabas, and relevant for our story today, is that he is a Levite from Cyprus. And that tells us a couple of interesting things about him. First of all, he is thoroughly ethnically Jewish. In fact, he’s a Levite, so he’s from the tribe that cared for temple worship in Jerusalem within that Levitical system. But he is also part of the diaspora. He’s not living in Jerusalem near the temple. He’s from Cyprus, a little island off the coast of Syria, just north of Palestine, out in the Mediterranean Sea. And it’s this story of Jesus that seems to draw him back to his faith. So he sells his land and makes his way back to Jerusalem, all of this to be part of this emerging Jesus movement that’s happening.

Well then, how does he end up in Antioch? His background is probably a big clue to the story, because the church in Antioch is a bit of an anomaly in itself.

See, at the end of Acts chapter 7, persecution of the church breaks out in Jerusalem, and at its climax one of the early leaders, a man named Stephen, is killed. He’s actually martyred for his faith in Jesus (Acts 7:54–60). Now, who is there directing all of that violence? Well, it’s actually Saul, who we also know is Paul, who also finds himself on the list of leaders at Antioch, by the way. We’ll get to him in a moment, because like any good Avengers film, there’s a lot of interwoven threads going on right now.

But initially what happens is that, because of this violence, the church in Jerusalem disperses. In fact, at the start of chapter 8 we read that because of the violence, all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:1). It’s actually Stephen’s death that inadvertently first spreads the good news beyond Jerusalem.

From there the story continues. In chapter 9, Saul has an encounter on the Damascus road and converts to the way of Jesus (Acts 9). In chapter 10, Peter has his encounter, his vision, meets Cornelius, and realizes that the story of Jesus extends beyond his ethnic boundaries (Acts 10). And then in chapter 11 we read that those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed had travelled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch:

Those who had been scattered travelled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the word only among Jews. But then some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord. The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord. (Acts 11:19–21)

When news of this reached the church in Jerusalem, they sent Barnabas to Antioch to see what was up (Acts 11:22).

So all these stories are kind of happening at the same time right now. Saul, also known as Paul, is converting to the way of Jesus. Peter is converting to the idea that salvation has been extended to non-Jewish people. And these scattered believers, completely independent of the apostles, are coming to a similar realization and just moving ahead, telling people about Jesus, starting churches completely on their own without the oversight of the disciples.

So the church in Jerusalem, which, remember, is full of all those OG apostles, hears about this and thinks, well, we should probably see what’s happening up there in Antioch. Let’s send someone to go check up on things. Who do we have? Well, we’ve got Barnabas here. We know he’s a good guy. He’s Jewish like us. And he’s already from Cyprus. He knows that area, he knows those people. Let’s send him north to do some reconnaissance.

Now, whether this is because the church in Jerusalem is skeptical of what’s happening, or whether they just want to encourage them, that’s up for speculation. Hard to know for sure. But I do think history shows they chose the right person, because as soon as he gets there, this is what we read: Barnabas arrived and saw what the grace of God was doing, and he was immediately glad and encouraged them (Acts 11:23). Which, if you remember, is exactly what the name Barnabas meant in the first place. The dude just does what he does.

So what does all this mean? Well, it means the church in Antioch is a related strain of Christianity. These were believers who first encountered the story of Jesus in Jerusalem, after all. But it’s almost like Antioch is a parallel evolutionary path of the story of the church. It develops not just in a different city, or even just a different culture and language, but in a very different way from the church in Jerusalem. It’s not founded by the disciples. It’s not built on the apostles. This is a ground-up, grassroots, lay-led explosion of good news.

Which is why, going back to chapter 13, we hear that the leaders of this new church include Barnabas, who we’ve just talked about, a displaced Jewish man drawn back to his faith by Jesus.

There’s Simeon called Niger, which is literally something like Simeon the black one,2 which to our ears probably sounds a little racially insensitive today, but is actually a very important point the writer is making here. The church is not what Jerusalem expected it to be. The church in Antioch is not even the complexion that Jerusalem expected to see.

There’s Lucius of Cyrene, a man we realistically don’t really know anything about, but who brings with him a very Roman name. This is not just a gentile. This is someone first-century Jewish people would have almost instinctively heard as enemy, because of that name.

And then Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch. That is a wild statement to read in the New Testament, because that is a reference to Herod Antipas, the same guy who ruled over Galilee3 and murdered John the Baptist a little earlier in the story (Mk 6:14–29). The language here identifies Manaen as a suntrophos of Herod,4 which could mean childhood friend, but realistically probably refers to what we might call a foster brother. These were young boys brought into the royal court and raised alongside royal princes, essentially so that the princes would have peers as they grew up. And that meant Manny was not at all part of the royal family, but he was raised in the royal court alongside the man who murdered the forerunner of Christ. Talk about guilt by association.

And yet here he is, leading the church in Antioch alongside the final name on our list, Saul, who today we primarily know by his Roman name, Paul. We’re used to hearing a lot about Paul, but you have to understand that at this point in the story Paul has been incommunicado for about a decade now. He left for Tarsus and Cilicia, and nobody has heard from him since. But in chapter 11, Barnabas goes to Tarsus to find him and brings him out of retirement to help found this church in Antioch (Acts 11:25–26).

This is a murderer’s row of characters listed here in chapter 13. If you’re into Marvel movies, this is more like the Thunderbolts than the Avengers, to be honest. And so if Peter thought his vision was a little destabilizing, just wait until Jerusalem gets a load of this. Barnabas the expendable one. Simeon the black one. Lucius the Roman one. Manaen the one guilty by association. And Saul the one we never really trusted anyway, but thankfully we hadn’t heard from him in a decade either.

That’s who’s leading a church that’s popped up in Antioch.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for credentials. I have worked really hard on my degrees, for example. I think if you want to lead, you should be willing to put in the work to learn first. But at some point, if the only people we are ever willing to follow are the people the establishment tells us we should, I think we will find that our communities lack the diversity of perspective and history and calling and creativity that characterizes the kingdom of God, and what the Spirit seems to do despite us.

Recently I wrote about Peter’s first sermon of the church era, where he quotes from the prophet Joel and talks about how God will pour out his Spirit on men and women, on young and old (Acts 2:17–18; Joel 2:28–29). And at the time I said that we are better when we listen to each other, that there is enough hierarchy in the world to last a lifetime, but it should not be that way in the community of Christ.5

Antioch is where the church antes up on that conviction.

And this is how it starts:

“Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people aren’t drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning!” (Acts 2:14–15).

lol

Still you have to appreciate that approach. Persuasive rhetoric 101: address objections right off the bat.

From here though things get far more interesting asPeter quotes two passages and scripture and offers some creative interpretation.

This is what he reads from the prophet Joel:

“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” (Acts 2:17–18).

Now there is something beautiful going on here. In our community we’re working through the opening of Acts and my colleague Bobbi Salkeld pointed out that it was the women who first discovered the empty tomb (Lk 24:1–10). It was the women who first preached the good news of the resurrection. It was the dudes (disciples) who were conspicuously absent at the end of the Gospels. Yet, when we turn the page to the opening of the book of Acts, the women are suddenly missing from the scene.

I think Bobbi is exactly right. There is probably a bit of respectability politics at play here. The early church is trying to stabilise. They are trying to legitimise themselves in a skeptical culture, and therefore we shouldn’t be too surprised to see them defaulting to figures who fall more in line with expectations

But we also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the very first sermon preached in this post-Jesus era explicitly declares that the Spirit of God has been poured out on sons and daughters, on men and on women alike.

Oftentimes, modern translations of the Bible will take the Greek word adelphoi, which means “brothers,” and translate it as “brothers and sisters.” That’s fine by the way. Actually a very accurate way to translate the term today, because in the first century, it was regularly used to refer to mixed-gender groups. That however, is not what is happening in this passage from Joel. This is not a linguistic concession to modern assumptions. Both of these lines explicitly and intentionally mention girls and women alongside their male counterparts. (both Acts 2:7-18 and the original quotation in Joel 2:28-29 both mention men and women, sons and daughters.)

The reason this matters is that the Bible, and the church down to this day, is very much a product of the culture and the moment in which it was birthed. You and I have to be able to read through that cultural context to understand it properly. That’s just good exegesis.

But then there are these moments where the Bible cuts through cultural expectations with such precision that it should completely destabilise our biases down to today.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy.

God’s Spirit will be poured out on men and on women.

We are better when we listen to each other—and I might add, when we start honouring and listening to our kids and our elders as well.

There is enough hierarchy in the world to last us a lifetime. It should not be that way at the feet of Jesus.

And beautifully, sometimes even when we forget this truth, the Spirit is there to remind us of a better way.

But Peter continues his quotation of Joel:

“I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Acts 2:19–21).

It is an interesting passage to start with.

Blood, fire, billows of smoke, a black hole sun, and a blood moon. What on earth are you doing here, Peter?

Actually, there is some profound theological interpretation going on here, and it all hinges on a recurring Old Testament theme: the Day of the Lord. The prophet Joel is all about this theme. In his writing, the Day of the Lord is a beautiful, poetic mishmash of apocalyptic imagery, judgment fantasy, and restoration narrative in which all things are eventually healed by God. But along the way, we get these cataclysmic cosmic signs of collapse. Empires crumble. Human arrogance dissolves. And utimately, there is a final confrontation with divine truth—what Joel calls the great and terrible day of the Lord (Joel 2:31). Joel sees this as a cataclysmic event at the end of a long, agonizing wait for righteousness to finally arrive.

Peter now reinterprets all of that.

He looks at this image and sees the cross.

“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” (Acts 2:22–24).

There are a couple of things here that are absolutely vital for the formation of early Christian theology.

Peter is reinterpreting the Day of the Lord, but he is not doing it out of thin air. At the very start of Jesus’ public ministry, Luke (who, remember, is the same author behind the book of Acts) records a moment where Jesus visits the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth (Lk 4:16). (I wonder if that parallel reference to Nazareth isn’t even a sublet end from the author linking these two scenes.) But there in Nazareth, Jesus walks to the front, unrolls the scroll of Isaiah, and reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour...” (Lk 4:18–19).

Then, in a move that is super important, Jesus rolls up the scroll, hands it back, sits down, and says, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Lk 4:21).

What we have to understand is that the passage Jesus just read is about the Day of the Lord. In the original text of Isaiah, the Messiah is sent to proclaim both the year of God’s favour and the day of God’s vengeance (Is 61:2). Jesus intentionally cuts his reading off halfway through a verse, rolls up the scroll, and sits down. He is making a wild claim about himself, yes, but he is also saying something incredibly important about how we have misinterpreted the nature of God’s judgment.

We assumed the Day of the Lord would be equal parts good news and bad news for humanity—favour and vengeance, great and terrible. Jesus, in one of his first statements, hints at the idea that we don’t properly understand the story yet.

So that moment in Luke 4 is kind of like day one. But as the story unfolds, Jesus teaches about the elusiveness and expansiveness of this kingdom. He speaks of how he must fall to the ground like a seed and die for it (Jn 12:24). But then at the climax of the story, on the verge of Holy Week, we hear him declare: “Now is the time for the judgment of this world.” (Jn 12:31).

Perhaps we could say, in his life, Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour. In his death and resurrection, we witness God’s judgment on the world.

Think of it this way: God’s furious judgment of the world, which we assumed would look like fire, brimstone, and cataclysm, is actually the resurrection that judges and then overturns our worst violence.

Death is annihilated. Sin is undone. Violence is overthrown. The world is judged, all because God refuses to allow violence to have the last word over the universe.

Well now, standing in the courtyard of Pentecost, Peter picks up this thread and says, “Okay, I think I’m starting to get it now.” When Joel talked about the Spirit being poured out, about light turning to darkness and a moon turning to blood, he was imagining God’s judgment coming down. But in God’s mind, that judgment was always going to look like grace that swallowing up our violence for good.

And just look at how Peter talks about atonement here. Jesus was handed over by God’s plan, and then we put him to death (acts 2:23). Notice that God is not nailing anyone to a cross. God is not pouring out violence on Jesus. God is participating in the salvation of the world through Jesus, absorbing the sin of the world and refusing to pay it back. Let’s be clear: God is not the villain of the cross wounding Jesus. God is the victim of the cross, experiencing exactly what our violence does.

And then, God raises him from the dead because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him (Acts 2:24). God enters the human story, descends into the absolute worst parts of it, and then transcends that story so that we can do the same.

This is Peter’s gospel.

And it’s probably most reflective of what theologians call the Christus Victor theory of atonement. This was the early church’s primary way of explaining the cross, and dominated Christian thought for about the first four hundred years. Notice though that it is a narrative shaped not around legal metaphors of penalty and transactional justice, but around God’s deep participation in our lives. Christ enters our story, experiences it alongside us, and because of his faithfulness to the way of God, God judges his story to be true and ours to be false.

Our sin, our violence, and all the ways we make a scapegoats of Jesus (and each other) are no longer the most true things in the universe. Now, resurrection is.

The day of God’s judgment on sin IS the proclamation of God’s favour on creation. That’s good news.

There Jesus weaves three famous stories of lostness: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and finally, a lost son. The trick is that these aren’t three parables but one larger story about the nature of our lostness.

We probably already know the major contours of the prodigal son. He demands his inheritance before his father’s death. Squanders it on wild living and then makes his way home to an unexpected welcome. It’s there Jesus presents his twist ending, but there are some neat moments along the way.

For one, just before the son hits the bottom of his spiral, Jesus describes this moment:

He longed to fill his stomach even with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one would give him anything. And then one day, he came to his senses. (Lk 15:16–17)

I want to pause on that phrase: he came to his senses. It is a perfectly fine English translation. But “coming to your senses” is a bit of an English idiom, isn’t it? It’s not like a familiar odour reminded him of his father’s house. Instead, what Jesus actually says is far more beautiful.

In the Greek text, the phrase is eis heauton elthon, which literally translates as “he returned to himself.”

Now, the core idea here is that he finally remembered who he was. It is as if he snapped out of the false self he had been living out of. And right there, at absolute rock bottom, he became himself all over again. And “came to his senses,” is a very serviceable translation of that moment. But this is also a bit of profound theology laying out in the open here.

At our worst, we are not truly ourselves. At our worst, is not our core identity. There might still be a mountain of work ahead to repair the relationships we’ve damaged—there always is—but even at our lowest, we can still return to the best of who we were created to be, if we choose to. Gotta love that reminder.

And so this kid returns to himself and realizes his situation:

“How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare? Here I am starving to death. This is crazy. I’ll go back to my dad and I’ll say, ‘Look, father, I’ve sinned against heaven and against you. I’m no longer worthy to be your son anymore. Just give me a job.’” (Lk 15:17–19)

He gets up and packs up goes back. But while he is still a long way off, his father sees him. He is filled with compassion. He runs to meet his son, throws his arms around him, and kisses him (v20).

The son then launches into his carefully rehearsed speech: “Father, I’ve sinned against you. I’ve sinned against heaven. I’m no longer worthy to be your son” (v21). But before he can even finish the pitch, the father is already calling out to the servants: “Bring the robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf, kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate” (v22–23).

Why? Because “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is now found” (Lk 15:24). So they all began to celebrate.

Even if you have only a passing familiarity with the Christian story, you likely know this part of the tale. It is beautiful, which is why we’ve retold it a thousand different ways. The Lion King, Good Will Hunting, Les Misérables, perhaps even Home Alone if you stretch the metaphor far enough. They are all just the prodigal son retold. A child who loses himself, remembers who he is, and musters the courage to find his way home, trusting that his father is gracious. Yet, when he arrives, he is still completely caught off guard by just how massive grace can really be.

I love this conviction Jesus holds: no matter how good we think God is, the actual experience of welcome is always better than we can imagine.

I have a rubric that governs all of my personal theology. If my image of God is not at least as good a parent as I am—if my image of God does not live up to the grace and love I aspire to hold for my own kids—then that image is not only broken, it is less than worthless.

First, because it falls short of the divine love that surrounds us all the time. But second, because if my image of God is less graceful than I already am, that image will slowly make me less graceful than I already am. Slowly squeeze the grace out of my already beleaguered theology, and that will eventually squeeze the grace right out of my life. And that is never the goal.

But deep down, I think we know God is like this. Somewhere in our bones, we understand that grace is real, that goodness is woven into the very fabric of the universe, and that love can actually win in the end. And by this point in the series of parables, even the religious critics who were grumbling at the start of the chapter (Lk 15:2) are probably now nodding along. Of course a good father welcomes his wandering son home because we want to believe this about ourselves.

But that means we haven’t hit the twist: all of this has just been a setup. The lost sheep, the lost coin, the restored son—it is all just a preamble to the real story Jesus wants to tell.

Parables are designed for the twist ending, the unexpected application of a surprising image. And up to this point, there is actually nothing surprising about what we’ve read.

We heard about an absurdly good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, and we begrudgingly agreed, “Yes, I hope God is like that” (Lk 15:4). We heard about an overjoyed woman searching for her lost coin, and maybe seeing God throw a neighbourhood block party over a bit of silver felt a bit dramatic, but it wasn’t an image we could really argue with (Lk 15:8–9). Now we have a father who is, quite frankly, just being a good dad, an image of God none of us would push back against.

And all of that means that Jesus has simply been slowly reeling us in, getting us into position so he can spring the real trap. It is a story about a father with two sons, and one of them is lost. It’s just not the one we thought it was.

While the party is starting inside, the older son is out in the field. As he approaches the house, he hears the music and the dancing (Lk 15:25). He calls over a servant and asks, “What on earth is going on here?”

“Your brother has come home,” the servant replies, “and your father has killed the fattened calf because he is back safe and sound” (Lk 15:26–27).

And the older brother becomes furious. He refuses to go in (Lk 15:28).

Don’t miss the symmetry here. Earlier, the father ran out to meet the younger son before he could even reach the house. Now, the father leaves the party to meet the older son before he can walk away.

This is the relentless character of grace. Whether you avoid religion entirely or you are far too religious for your own good, grace will step outside to find you anyway.

But the older brother is not having it. He turns to his father:

“Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” (Lk 15:29–30)

It is helpful to watch how the older brother fills in the blanks here. Did the younger brother actually spend his money on prostitutes? I don’t know. Jesus didn’t provide that salacious detail, only hinted at his “wild living” (Lk 15:13). But this older brother, who hasn’t spoken to his sibling in years, suddenly pretends to know the particulars of his escapade.

And for the record, we do this all the time too, don’t we? We fill in details to expand the stories of those who offend us, growing them in ways that justify our own bitterness. Our perceived slights have a way of cycling out of control unless we consciously choose to rein them in. Another gem just waiting for us to notice in this story.

But the father looks at his lost son with tenderness: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. Today we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (Lk 15:31–32).

As here Jesus repeats that final, familiar refrain—the same one we heard with the sheep and the coin—the trap finally snaps shut. We realize what has actually been happening throughout this entire chapter.

The lost sheep wasn’t the fairy tale. The ninety-nine we imagined staying put in the open country were.

The recovered coin was the surprise, the idea that nine had stayed in the purse without filing down behind cushion were.

The real offence that catches God off guard is not when any of us demand our inheritance early (Lk 15:12). That’s just tragic, human foolishness—it’s what we all do in one way or another.

No, the absolutely absurd idea is that any of us have ever believed we’ve been in the right all this time— that’s what lostness looks like.

And that is who this entire trilogy of stories is pointed at. All of us who think we know better than we do and miss out witnessing grace because of it.

The truth is that every single one of us has, at some point, found ourselves standing out in the yard, missing the party, and refusing to step inside simply because of who else was invited.

The question is never whether we are lost. We are.

The question is whether we will stoop to attend the kind of party where people like us—are welcomed into with open arms.

We want God to be the shepherd who rescues us, the woman who values us, the father who embraces us. We know in our bones that God is good, and that grace is the very air we breathe. But the twist of the parable is that we often think we are the exception to the rule—the only ones who earned our spot at the table.

Yet, the beautiful, hopeful reality of the Jesus story is that even when we are resistant, even when we are grumbling on the porch, refusing to join the dance, God still comes out to find us, God leaves the divine party, to walk headlong into our self-righteous isolation, and invite us inside once again. And then maybe to wait there with us, in the cool of the evening, for as long as we need to realize what lostness really looks like.

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One of the real weaknesses in the evangelical approach to reading Scripture is the lack of imagination, a lack of playfulness in how we engage the text. Turning to our Jewish neighbours to understand how they have read their own stories opens us up to the kind of creativity the Bible not only invites but probably really demands.

And one of the most interesting examples of this comes in one of the most difficult stories anywhere in Scripture: the binding of Isaac (Gen 22:1–19). There was a famous rabbi named Rashi, who lived about a thousand years ago, and I think in some ways he helps bring this story not only closer to home, but opens it up to some unexpected implications.

There is this almost awkward, somewhat stilted, stuttering request from God:

“Take your son, your only son, whom you love — Isaac” (Gen 22:2).

Even in Hebrew, the line reads awkwardly.

Perhaps that is why there is a famous midrash from Rashi, who died in 1105. He fills in the pauses and imagines the exchange as a conversation between Abraham and God.1

“Take your son,” says God.

“Which son?” replies Abraham.

“Your only son,” says God.

“Well, I do have two sons,” says Abraham. “Maybe you forgot about Ishmael.”

“No,” says God. “I remember him. In fact, I love him dearly. I’m looking after him right now. I’m talking about the son you love.”

“Well, I love both of them,” says Abraham, as God stares back with raised eyebrow.

So God responds, “Let’s not play games here, Abraham. It’s Isaac we’re talking about.”

This kind of playful reading is interesting because it reminds us that sometimes what is not said is where the most important words lie in a story.

And there is so much room for us to bring ourselves into what we read all across the story.

For example, earlier in Genesis, we meet Abraham’s father, Terah. And there in Abraham’s introduction we encounter this moment where Terah dies, and it’s only in the aftermath, in his grief, that God speaks and calls Abraham somewhere new (Gen 11:32–12:1). There’s a lot to reckon with there in the dialogue of faith and doubt and grief and patience.2

But, then after I wrote about that, a colleague asked me, “What if it wasn’t only in the aftermath? What if God had been speaking to Abraham all along, since childhood? What if Terah was an imposing figure, a bad dad, someone who took up too much space for a young Abraham to hear his divine calling? What if that’s why he only seems to hear God after his father has passed?”

Now, is that what happened? I don’t know. Neither do you.

But does that possibility open the story in new ways? Does it allow you to see our own story reflected back in surprising ways?

I think it might.

What Rashi is doing is taking a story that can feel very distant from anything in my life and bringing it a little closer to home.

Have I ever played favourites?

Have I ever been partial in ways that damaged the people around me?

Have I ever been confronted with the consequences of that?

This exercise helps place the story in the context of what we have already read about Abraham. We have seen Abraham in dialogue with God. We have seen Abraham implore God to do what is right (Gen 18:25). Yet now, perhaps confronted with his own malfeasance, the way he has not treated his sons fairly, Abraham seems to shrink from the responsibility of confronting God.3

And suddenly the story becomes less abstract. Less distant. Less like a theological puzzle trapped in the ancient world.

It starts to become recognizably human.

3

There’s this reasonably famous encounter between a disciple named Philip and an Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts chapter 8. And often, the story gets celebrated for the miraculous nature of their encounter. Spirit-led evangelism and all that.

I think the story is actually much better. But it does take a bit of work to get there.

Let’s start with Philip. What do we know about this guy?

Well, there is a Philip named among the twelve disciples. This is not that Philip. This Philip is introduced in the book of Acts, and interestingly, becomes a bit of a recurring character throughout the book.

We first meet him in Acts 6. The early Christian community is gathering regularly and sharing resources with one another. And because of that, a lot of people in need are joining the church, particularly people who need food. The response grows so dramatic that the original disciples end up spending most of their time on food preparation and distribution.

And I really love this part of the story because the early church does not look at the situation and say, “Well, preaching is more important. Let’s focus there.” Instead, they pause and reflect and ask, “what is actually happening here?”

Turns out the Hellenized community is complaining that the Hebraic community is prioritizing care for their own widows over others (Acts 6:1).

Now Hellenized refers primarily to Jewish people, though likely some Gentile converts as well, who spoke Greek and largely operated within Greek culture. Hebraic refers to the Jewish Christian community that maintained more traditional Jewish language and practice.

The Hebraic group may have been culturally marginal within the Roman world, but they were still the dominant culture inside the early church.

This tension keeps surfacing in the early years of Christianity. Peter and Paul almost come to represent these two instincts. Peter tends to hold more tightly to Jewish tradition, while Paul advocates for a more open and diverse expression of faith.

But what fascinates me in Acts 6 is that the apostles, who all belong to the Hebraic camp, do not dismiss the concerns of the newcomers. Instead, they say, “Look, we do need to focus on telling the story of Jesus. But feeding people matters just as much.”

So they appoint seven leaders “full of the Spirit and wisdom” to oversee the distribution of food and ensure it is handled fairly (Acts 6:3).

Philip is one of those seven.

What is of note here is that all seven men appointed come with Hellenized names: Philip, Stephen, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus (Acts 6:5). We are even told Nicolaus is a convert to Judaism from Antioch. Which means, the early church leadership doesn’t just say, “We’ll do better.” They actually hand responsibility over to the very people who felt overlooked.

They say, in effect, “Teach us how to do better?”

It’s a pretty remarkable moment but it’s also what establishes Philip’s story for us.

So what do we know about him from his first appearance?

We know he is wise. We know he is full of the Spirit. We know he is concerned for forgotten people. We know he is perfectly happy making lunch behind the scenes. We know his role in the church is forged in a moment of cultural tension where leadership is shared so the overlooked can be given a voice.

But that is not the only glimpse we get into Philip outside his Ethiopian encounter.

Years later, Philip appears again in Acts 21. By this point, the text calls him “Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven” (Acts 21:8). He has settled down in Caesarea. He has a house and a family. Paul comes to stay with him.

And even after all these years, Philip is still remembered as one of the seven who helped care for widows and he seems to have picked up another nickname, probably a reference to the story in chapter 8.

But now we learn something else: Philip has four unmarried daughters who prophesy (Acts 21:9).

So this man appears three times in Scripture with very little fanfare. Most of his life happens off the page. Yet somehow he becomes one of the first leaders of the church chosen from outside the dominant culture to care for neglected people, shares the gospel with an Ethiopian official (Ethiopia which goes into become one of the first Christian kingdoms in the world by the way), and he raises four daughters, who in the first century, all decide they don’t need men, they have better things to do, things like declaring the goodness of God.

Philip is kind of a boss.

Still, why spend so much time on all of this just to read a story in Acts 8?

Because if we are going to talk about miraculous serendipity, we need to understand the people inside the story.

Our lives are not just a series of coincidence, miraculous or otherwise, they are the product of a lifetime of choices stacked up into a narrative.

Acts 8 begins this way:

“Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza’” (Acts 8:26).

That is an odd introduction.

First of all, “an angel of the Lord said to Philip” feels strangely casual. Angelic appearances in Scripture usually arrive with at least a little fanfare. Here it just sounds like someone giving directions.

Part of what may be happening is that we are reading too much into the English translation. The Greek word angelos simply means “messenger.” It can refer to an angelic being, but it can also refer more generally to a message or messenger. But there is another detail often missed. The phrase is not simply “go south.” It is “get up and go south.” This is why some scholars, including F. F. Bruce, suggest Luke may be using angelos somewhat interchangeably with the prompting of God’s Spirit here, making the emphasis less about a dramatic angelic visitation and more about Philip discerning direction.1

Does that make the story less miraculous?

I do not think so.

But it does make the story line up remarkably well with what we already know about Philip from Acts 6.

He is full of wisdom. Full of the Spirit. Someone already accustomed to listening for God. Already looking for ways to serve. Already willing to trust a prompting when it comes.

So Philip heads south toward Gaza.

And this is not exactly the Gaza we think of today. The ancient Philistine city had been destroyed and rebuilt. The road functioned as a kind of gateway between North Africa and the Mediterranean world.

What is interesting is that the phrase translated “desert road” can also mean wilderness or desolate place. Some translations even understand it as referring not to the road but to Gaza itself, possibly the abandoned husk of that older city. The King James for example renders the verse, “go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert” Acts 8:26b KJV.

And again, when you think about Philip, this starts to feel less random.

A man shaped by life serving the margins. A man chosen to advocate for overlooked people. A man attentive to voices outside the centre. Of course he heads toward the edges where communities have been forgotten.

And there, on the road, he meets an Ethiopian official (Acts 8:27).

The man belongs to a group excluded from full temple worship (Deut 23:1). He is not Jewish by descent, yet he has travelled to Jerusalem to worship and is now reading Isaiah aloud.

And Philip approaches and... listens.

That detail matters to me.

Philip is not presented as a prophet thundering a divine message. He just seems like someone open to encounter. Someone willing to pay attention to another human being and see where the conversation leads.

There is no promised outcome. No grand strategy. Just a prompting toward the margins. And there he notices a stranger already searching spiritually.

Honestly, in context, this reads less to me like random miracle and more like the natural fruit of a deeply formed life.

Said another way, what if the miracle isn’t the moment at the end of the road when everything comes together but all the choices that shaped Philip into the kind of person who would recognize the moment when it arrived.

Sometimes I think the miracle is that we notice what is happening around us at all.

In fact, I think sometimes our idea of the miraculous can be far too small. We focus so much on the surprising moment that we miss all the quiet ways we are being shaped and guided all along.

In other words, Philip recognizes the moment because Philip had become, through a lifetime of choices, the sort of person who could recognize it.

Even when they speak the conversation seems so natural. Philip doesn’t force an agenda. He doesn’t announce, “God told me to speak to you. Listen up.” He simply asks the right question at the right moment and the traveller is the one who extends the invitation to sit and talk (Acts 8:30–31).

There is something deeply disarming about that.

I am convinced the miracle in the story is not simply that Philip found himself on the right road. The miracle is that Philip had become the sort of person capable of being the friend this traveller needed in that moment.

And yes, when the threads connect and everything suddenly makes sense, that feels miraculous.

But maybe Philip learning how to listen to Hellenized widows in Acts 6 is what teaches him how to listen well here in Acts 8, which is what teaches him how to raise daughters who prophesy in Acts 21.

And maybe what we call miraculous is often just the visible blossom of roots that run much deeper through out lives than we even realize.

And if that’s the case, then maybe the most important miracle is not the one we cannot explain but one that suddenly seems to explain so much of our story back to us.

1

“Luke’s statement that “the angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, ‘Rise up ...’ ” is probably a vivid way of denoting Philip’s divine guidance.” F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, NICNT. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 174.

“I could draw within a Planck’s width of God—the smallest distance possible in the universe—and there would still remain an infinitely wide, fundamental category difference between myself and the Divine.

Because I exist, and God doesn’t.”

That’s a line from a sermon I preached a few weeks ago. I thought it went over pretty well.

But here’s how I got there.

I want to start to the beginning. And by that, I mean the very beginning. Because, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen 1:1)

Now, that’s a pretty familiar line but then that’s also part of the problem with it. Because our modern translations are starting to signal that we might have missed the point. If you look at the footnotes of the latest version of the NIV, there is a little asterisk in verse one. And down at the bottom of the page, it says: “or, when God began to form the heavens and the earth.” In fact, my favourite English translation right now, the NRSV Updated Edition, has gone ahead and flipped the two lines with “In the beginning” now relegated to the footnotes.

The reason for this change gets a little technical on the language side. The first word of your Bible appears to be in the construct rather than the absolute state. All that means is that it is part of a linguistic construction which is dependent on the clause that follows. Think of it as: “In the beginning of when God created.”

The second reason for the shift is more cosmological. Today, we have a concept called ex nihilo, and that means out of nothing. The idea is that God can create anything, even a universe, out of nothing. Now, if you’re God, that seems like a thing you could do. I’m certainly not questioning whether God can create ex nihilo, but that is a much later philosophical innovation. It’s not what Genesis is talking about here.

In the very ancient world, the common wisdom was that everything had always existed because everything was part of a cycle. As Thomas Cahill writes in his book The Gift of the Jews:

On every continent, in every society, [we] would have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclitus, Lao-Tsu, and Siddhartha would one day give their followers: do not journey but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow—on all that is past or passing or to come—until you have absorbed the pattern and have come to peace with the Great Wheel and with your own death and the death of all things in the corruptible sphere. 1

In other words, everything has been and everything will be again. What this suggests is that Genesis is not talking about the formation of the universe out of nothing. That wasn’t even a question they were asking yet; “universe” wasn’t even a concept. Genesis is speaking to the formation of the world as they experienced it. You could think of it this way: Genesis doesn’t imagine a time before creation. It starts with creation being shaped and formed, guided by the creative instincts of God.

That however, is really interesting when we compare it to how we think about creation today.

We all know about the Big Bang theory— a mediocre though surprisingly ocular sitcom from the late oughts. But there was another Big Bang originally proposed by a Catholic priest.

In the early twentieth century, Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest who went to study astrophysics at MIT. In the twenties, a number of physicists, including a guy named Einstein (you might have heard of him), were starting to realize that the idea of a static universe just didn’t math out. And so Lemaître, back in 1927, wrote a paper that went ignored for a few years, but it used general relativity to describe an expanding universe. In the 1930s, this caught on because Edwin Hubble—who would eventually have a space telescope named after him—was producing some of the earliest, farthest-reaching images of space, all from his own backyard with a telescope that he built and those images did, in fact, seem to confirm that distant stars and galaxies were moving away from us.

With that established in both math and observation, Lemaître then started to wonder about the next logical question: if the universe is expanding and it’s moving out, doesn’t that mean that originally, sometime long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, it all started somewhere? So Lemaître wrote another paper calling this theoretical origin point the “primordial atom.” Later physicists would pick up on this and expand on it, speculating about how this hot, dense core of all matter and energy would explode out into a universe.

Scientists continue to refine this theory. It’s changed a lot since first proposed. But today we understand that the universe expanding rapidly in the first few moments—we call that inflation—and then we see it settle down and expand more slowly over the next 8 billion or so years. (At that point, for some yet full explained reason the universe began accelerating it’s expansion once again.)

What’s fascinating is that today cosmologists tell us we can measure the universe all the way back to 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the beginning. That is an infinitesimally small amount of time we call a Planck. It is the smallest measure of time in the universe, beyond which all of our theories about how anything works absolutely stop working.

And if you wanted to put that in religious terms, you might say we can talk about when God began to create, but we have absolutely no language to describe anything before that.

Now I’m not presenting this as some kind of apologetic to argue that the Bible understood cosmology before we did. That’s not my intent. That’s certainly not what the writers of Genesis were thinking about. Remember, “universe” wasn’t even a concept then. But Lemaître himself summed this up when he wrote:

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being... For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God... It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.” 2

And that is what fascinates me.

Because our religious sensibilities tell us we can’t really speak of God before creation, and our cosmology tells us we hit a wall in reaching back before creation. But what if it is our imagined familiarity with God that’s been getting in the way?

The comedian Pete Holmes has a bit where he says we are all like characters in a novel trying to figure out the author while we’re still in the novel. Imagine Aragorn and his Elfish friend Orlando trying to understand J.R.R. Tolkien from within the world of Middle-earth. Can they ever see all the way to a professor at Oxford University writing a novel from the gates of Mordor?

Part of what I like about that as an image is that I think they can learn a lot about Tolkien from within his world. You get a sense of him from his story, how it unfolds, how the story pulls together in the end. In that sense, yes, the characters might actually know something about their creator. And yet, the idea that they could reconstruct our world from theirs is absurdly clarifying for me.

I’m a character in a story that God is writing. I can observe divine fingerprints in the story as it unfolds around me. I can even understand something of the nature of my author expressed around me. But as Lemaître says, any aspiration at familiarity with that God is as absurd as a character composed of letters on a page trying to comprehend the living, breathing universe that you and I inhabit.

Now, as a Christian, I also believe that God entered into the story with us. God has given us Jesus so that everything we need to know about the divine can be seen in his life. Jesus shows us what God would look like on the page with us. And that means we can indeed know what it means to live lives that flow with rather than against the universe that’s been created for us. But even incarnation is God expressed inside the story. It is divine self-disclosure within the confines of our limitations.

So, I believe I can discern God from within the story I am a part of. I trust can follow the way of Jesus and in that even experience the inexhaustible love that is God in tangible ways. But I also recognize that I can never peer outside the universe as it’s written to fully comprehend God as God. That, is beyond me.

Perhaps you could say this: I could draw within a Planck’s width of God—the smallest distance possible in the universe—and there would still be an infinitely wide fundamental category difference between myself and the divine. Because I exist, and God doesn’t.

Now hear me out. I’m not abandoning my faith. I’m actually exposing the core of my belief, which is that I think everything that exists is created in God. I think everything that exists is created by God, which is why I am with Paul when he says, “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Col 1:16–17)

But when I read that all things are held together in God—sustained , as some translations render this Greek word, sunistēmi—what I realize is that God is not another thing in the universe with me. God is, in the words of Paul Tillich, the very “ground of being.”3 Maybe we could even say this: God is the name we give to what we experience as existence.

Today we know today that we’re made up of cells. And those cells are made up of molecules. Those molecules are made of atoms, and those atoms are made of protons and neutrons surrounded by a swirling cloud of probability that we call an electron.

But because of quantum theory we can go even smaller. Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. And quarks are the smallest bits of matter we can detect but even they interact with what we call bosons. And those aren’t even things at all—at least not the way we like to think of things. Bosons are more like excited fields of energy, and yet they carry the relationship between the smallest particles in the universe. In doing that, those fields of energy make existence possible.

So there’s a boson called a photon that carries the electromagnetic force between electrons, and sometimes it looks like light. There’s a boson called a gluon that carries the “strong force” between quarks, holding them together in the centre of an atom. It’s the strongest force in the universe but it stays contained in the centre of an atom. Then there are W and Z bosons which carry the “weak force.” They can rework a quark—a thing that exists—into a different type of thing inside an atom. And they that what allows the universe to change and evolve at all.

The point is, the very idea of “being a thing,” the concept of existence itself, is just a continuous line of relationships all the way down until all that’s left appears to be nothing but the relationships. When you get small enough, things don’t exist anymore; just relationships.

Organisms are interdependent. Cells are interconnected. Molecules are strings of atoms. Atoms are collections of particles. Those particles are groups of quarks, which are waves of bosons, which are just relationships of energy that glue the universe together. There’s absolutely no point in existence where anything that exists, exists on its own.

And God does not exist at any of those points along the chain. God is the name we give to that which holds all of it together.

I don’t mean this in a “God of the gaps” kind of way, like: “we don’t understand this, therefore God.” What I mean is that from everything we do know about what it means to exist—from the gravity that we use to send Artemis II to the far side of the moon and back, to the cosmology of the Big Bang, to the quantum dynamics of particles—all of it is defined by relationship.

Everything has everything to do with everything else.

The most important thing in the universe isn’t in the universe. It’s the relationship that sustains all of it. A relationship that somehow existed on the other side of creation. Before there was a universe, in a reality that you and I can’t even begin to imagine, but one we describe with words like Father and Son and Spirit. Images that reach toward an imagination of God not as a being, but as the very relationship from which all existence blooms.

God doesn’t exist, at least not in the way you and I do. Because God is the space between us that allows the universe to exist at all.

And faith then is about slowly learning to trust that it is that same divine relationship that makes our existence possible that then forms, and guides, and shapes, and holds all things together—in love.

Sometimes I’m not sure what to do with the idea of miracles but I know the real miracle isn’t when the rules break. The miracle is that the rules exist at all.

That gravity exists. That the strong force holds within an atom. That you are here breathing molecules of oxygen right now. That you and I are matter that can think and feel and speak in love. that we are both a little bit of all of the relationships that comprise the universe, but we get the miracle to know about ourselves.

Which means you and I get to choose your steps in the world. We get to decide to love. We get to use all of the relationships of atoms and cells and quarks and personal history that comprise our self-awareness to better the relationships that comprise someone else’s self-awareness in the universe.

I say this without a hint of sarcasm: that is fantastically miraculous.

Because God is the idea that the same reality that holds quarks together inside an atom, the same reality that stretches galaxies across billions of light years, is the same reality holding this moment together in your mind right now. All of it is just relationships. And that is what we’re talking about when we talk about God. The Ground of Being that sustains and holds all things. The Ground of Being that enters the pages of the story with us. The Ground of Being which shows us there is no such thing as an end to relationships, which means there is always resurrection because the universe is a miracle of love all the way down.

3

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).

Well, I was teaching through some of the parables in Luke recently and one word stuck with me longer than I expected it to. It’s not even part of the parable really, it’s just the set up. Jesus is pushing back against his critics and Luke says, “all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.” (Luke 13:17)

And here’s the thing, I get it. We all want to see the bad guys get theirs, a little schadenfreude is always welcome, but I don’t think we should read that as Jesus’ intent.

Now, sure, Jesus is pointed. He calls these men hypocrites a couple verses earlier (15). In fact, he calls them out on their bad behaviour in front of everybody in this scene. So, I think he clearly wants to make his point. I just think it is important for us to mark the distinction between Jesus’ intent and how that message is received.

First, if you read the encounter in Luke 13:10-14, Jesus priority is clearly this woman who is being castigated, not the men he excoriates. He is concerned with the person who is being subjected to scriptural interpretations that valued pedantry over care. But still, in everything I’ve come to understand about Jesus, in watching the way he interacts through scripture, even with his critics, I have to imagine his hope here in this moment is not humiliation. I think it’s that they might actually hear what he is saying. And that’s quite a bit different.

Because personally, I don’t think Jesus is ever trying to humiliate anyone.

Now, I know I have a lot of things that are wrong in my theology. I don’t know what they are. If I did, I would change them. But I do know in looking back on twenty years of teaching the Bible that I have changed my mind. I’ve had my ideas blown up and my biases overturned more times than I would like to admit. So it stands to reason I’ll find a few more errors over the next 20 years.

And yes, sometimes that has felt a little humiliating to find those mistakes—largely because a lot of what I have said got recorded and put online. But that feeling is about how I’ve received that correction; I don’t think it was God’s intent for me.

And I think my concern is that If my hope ever starts to become intertwined with the humiliation of those I disagree with, I worry that I will make it harder for myself to be open to where I need to change in the future. I might start to see change as something to run away from.

And here is the thing: changing your mind based on new information might be humbling, but it shouldn’t be humiliating to admit that you were wrong. We make it humiliating for each other but in God’s economy change is actually a blessing.

In fact, I’m convinced it’s actually in refusing to admit our mistakes where correction shifts from being a gift to feeling like a curse. And that is not a place I ever want to find myself because I want to keep myself open to change. Which I have to teach myself to be open to how others are changing as well.

Bottom line, don’t put your hope in the humiliation of anyone. Invest yourself in the elevation of those who have been humbled, just like Jesus does here, and maybe we’ll be better off for it.

Photo by Abhinav Anand on Unsplash

“What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.” (Lk 13:18–19)

One of the first things I notice about Luke’s version of the mustard seed parable is that Jesus doesn’t mention the size of the seed at all. Now that’s not necessarily a problem. The diminutive size of mustard seeds was well known. Jesus (and others by the way1) had referenced their surprising growth before. Here, though, that's not the starting point for the story, which got me thinking.

Because there are at least three problems with this story.

The first problem is that mustard seeds aren’t supposed to go in gardens. In the laws of Leviticus, there are strict rules about planting. And one of the big prohibitions was against planting two different types of seeds in the same plot of land (Lev 19:19). Jesus tells another parable about wheat and weeds growing mingled together that plays off this same rule (Mt 13:24-30).

Now, in this story, the man plants a single seed, so he doesn’t technically break the law. But the problem with mustard seeds specifically is that they grow into these scraggly, scrubby bushes that tend to creep and crawl their way across your garden. I remember at our previous house, we had these big lilac bushes. They were beautiful for about fourteen minutes in the spring each year, but they were also notorious for popping up all over the place. You could find a shoot of a lilac five feet away from the original bush. They were very hard to contain.

Mustard bushes are the same. Once you plant one anywhere near anything else, it has a way of popping up in the next plot where it wasn’t supposed to be, accidentally running afoul of the Levitical code. Because of this, in the Mishna—a collection of Jewish teachings that sat alongside the Hebrew scriptures—there is a section called Seder Zeraim, which means the “Order of Seeds.” In that text, it’s strongly advised against planting mustard seeds in gardens where they might unintentionally cross over into the next plot of land.2 So, technically, the man in Jesus’ story hasn’t broken a rule yet, but he is skirting pretty close to the line already.

The second problem is that mustard seeds do not grow into trees. They are more like scrubby, scraggly shrubs. While these shrubs can occasionally develop a thicker, more developed stalk that looks a bit like a trunk, they are decidedly not trees. This isn’t just a mistranslation by the way. In Greek, mustard plants belong to a category called lachana, or garden herbs. Yet, Jesus very specifically uses the word dendron, or tree, in his story.

That isn’t a mistake; it’s a callback to the Hebrew prophets. We see this imagery in Ezekiel:

“I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it... On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches.” (Ezek 17:22–23)

We see it again in Daniel’s vision:

“There before me stood a tree in the middle of the land. Its height was enormous... Its leaves were beautiful, its fruit abundant, and on it was food for all. Under it the wild animals found shelter, and the birds lived in its branches.” (Dan 4:10–12)

These passages are about the purpose and the destination of God’s people: a great tree that becomes a source of shelter and food, a space where even the birds find refuge. Jesus is using language intentionally to connect his words to the imagination of the Hebrew people. He wants us to hear this story and go look up those passages.

And when we do, we find that the prophetic imagination for the kingdom of God throughout the Hebrew scriptures looks like a tiny sprig planted by God that grows into an enormous, majestic cedar. It’s a very familiar story. Except, in Jesus’ version, it isn’t a great cedar. It’s a scrubby shrub planted where it isn’t really supposed to be. It’s the kind of weed that has a tendency to pop up in places it shouldn’t.

Which brings us to a third problem: what it attracts. Because in Jesus’ story, the shrub attracts more of the things that show up where they aren’t supposed to be.

In the images from Ezekiel and Daniel, the idea of the birds gathering in the branches of a great cedar is beautiful. Those birds represent all of the nations turning toward God, finding respite and peace in a violent world. The image is wonderful, but you know what you don’t want gathering in your garden, building nests where you’ve cultivated plants to feed your family? Birds.

We have some big, beautiful trees in our backyard. They provide nice shade and they’re fun for my kids to climb. But you know what they also bring to our backyard? Magpies. If you have never met a magpie screeching at you just because you dared to step outside into your own yard, let me tell you, it is less than pleasant. I’m a vegetarian; I don’t eat chicken. But if magpie was on the menu, I might consider it just out of spite. (it’s a joke, chill out, corvids are wonderful)

The point is, the image of the “birds of the air” gathering in a cedar is beautiful, the picture of “birds of the air” gathering in your garden—swooping in to scream at you while they eat your crops and make a home in the mustard plant you are working hard to cultivate tells a very different story. A prophetic story with a very important twist. The kingdom is not just something that grows large. That’s the part we know. The kingdom is also something that pops up where it’s not supposed to be and welcomes those who aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. That’s the part we don’t.

This parable takes a repeated image from the Hebrew scriptures—one that spoke to national pride and, let’s be honest, probably even national arrogance, and completely inverts the narrative. It’s an image that traditionally said, “We’re the ones everyone will come to. We’re the source of God’s blessing. We’re the shining light on a hill.” Jesus says that sure, we might get to plant the seed, but the kingdom grows where it wants to, and it welcomes those we would usually shoo away. (In my book Upside Down Apocalypse, I compared this inversion to Jesus describing the United States as a seagull instead of a Bald Eagle.3)

And to properly understand why Jesus is using this specific imagery, we have to look at the encounter that immediately preceded this teaching in Luke. Jesus had just entered a synagogue and healed a woman who had been burdened for eighteen years. The religious critique was that his timing was improper; that she should have come back another time and respected the rules of the Sabbath (Lk 13:10–17).

Jesus essentially tells them that they don’t know their own rules to begin by answering their quote of Deuteronomy 5:13 wth a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 5:14, but more importantly, he suggests they have no idea what the kingdom of God looks like when it shows up near them when he asks, “What should I compare it to? Well, I’ll compare it to your imagination.”

You think the kingdom of God is like a majestic cedar: strong, tall, and powerful. You think the kingdom will look exactly like how you want to look at yourself. I tell you, the kingdom of God is like a scrubby bush that shows up not just where you don’t expect, but where you don’t want it to be. And it welcomes not just those who show up on a different timeline, but those you would chase away. The kingdom is for those like this woman whom you’ve scolded, and I have welcomed.

This story isn’t about a kingdom that surprises us with its scale. It’s about a kingdom that surprises us with its character. It isn’t a story about majesty and spectacle; it’s about a kingdom that looks decidedly ordinary. It’s not a story about some far-off eschatology, about some day when the kingdom finally gets big enough to take over. This is a story about grace. It’s about a kingdom that exists right now in our midst, popping up and poking through all around us, and our consistent ability to miss it.

And maybe that means this story starts to feel familiar in a way you didn’t expect. Maybe you have never cared about mustard seeds, but maybe you have been the one on the outside looking in at religion. You’ve found yourself drawn to Jesus. Something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, and yet you knew you needed to move closer to his story. Except whenever you tried, there was always someone there to say, “Not now, not that way. You’re doing it wrong. Come back when you can follow the rules properly. Our cedar is too beautiful for you to sully.”

To which we finally hear Jesus say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and to me, a kingdom that pops up unexpected—a kingdom that tends to cross our carefully manicured lines and provides shelter for the ignored—is gorgeous. That is the kind of kingdom I would be interested in planting. Perhaps that kind of kingdom could actually begin to shape the way we care for each other while we wait for it to appear.

Well, recently I was wearing that same outfit as I was preaching through the text of Luke. And what caught my attention was the disciples desire for a little more simplicity and structure in their lives, specifically they ask Jesus to teach them to pray the way John has taught his disciples to pray (Lk 11:1).

So, how did they pray?

Well, earlier in the text, we find a critique that offers the closest glimpse we get into the fact that John the Baptist and his disciples had a specific practice of prayer and fasting (Lk 5:33). They seem to have maintained a very rigorous routine, one that, perhaps, Jesus’ disciples were looking at with a bit of envy.

Now, maybe you think to yourself: why would anyone ever want a rigorous practice of prayer and fasting? That sounds like a lot of work. True, but I think, deep down all of us want a good rhythm.

You may not know this about me, but it’s not just my shirts. I get up every morning and put on one of my two pairs of jeans. I grab two socks from a drawer full of identical socks. I put on a black t-shirt from my stack. If it’s a weekday, I put on my grey hoodie. If it’s a weekend, I put on my grey button-up shirt.

I get a haircut every six months, whether I need it or not. I sit at my desk all day Wednesday and I write. I drink coffee on Thursday and meet with people from the community. I like to get up every day knowing exactly what I’m going to do. It just feels good—to me. You, however, may not enjoy any of that, which is fine, by the way, being boring is not a spiritual gift, it’s just my thing.

However, I do think a lot of us enjoy predictability in our lives. In fact, we know that because psychology tells us how important predictability is for our well-being. From an evolutionary standpoint, the unexpected often meant danger. So when things are consistent and the environment feels predictable, our brains are actually wired to slow down. We conserve energy in times of low anxiety. We look for friendships and relationships that are stable and that’s when we feel safe enough to open up and tell someone about ourselves, which is important for sense of connectedness and mental health.

In fact, even the most spontaneous among us are wired to look for routines we know. It might be as simple as your morning routine or, honestly, coming to church and participating in a liturgy. Those predetermined routines reduces our mental load and remind us that we don’t have to figure everything out ourselves, some things are already known.

As I mentioned, the whole reason I started dressing this way was to reduce the choices I didn’t care about so I could keep my mental energy for things I did. (By the way, if you like fashion, that is a beautiful thing to put your creativity into. Please, keep doing that. The world would be very dull if we all wore grey shirts every day.)

But imagine someone came along and told you, “Hey, you can pray a certain way or you can attend a particular church. You can listen to a very specific preacher and all of your questions will be answered.” What if you never had to wonder about the divine again? Do this and you will know your standing with God. Do this and you can be assured of your salvation. Follow these simple principles and you, too, can have the confidence of a child with a permanent marker in a freshly painted room.

That sounds naive to think that a formulaic prayer could ever get us there. But if you can turn that corner, if someone can sell you that idea, it is an incredibly compelling offer.

I think that’s what the disciples are after here in Luke 11. They aren’t dying for more rules. They are searching for more structure to reduce their mental load. It is their version of my grey shirts. To them, at least from the outside, it seems like John is offering that to his followers: “Do this and you will live.”

What’s fascinating to me is that Jesus seems to both understand that desire for structure and yet still be very aware of its limitations. And so, he offers his friends a prayer that they can pray (a tight version of the Lord’s prayer found in Lk 11:2–4). A prayer we still recite together for all the same reasons they did, and for the same reasons Christians have been doing it for thousands of years. But Jesus also follows it up with a parable that refuses to allow the recitation to be the end of the conversation (Lk 11:5–13). He gives them the rhythm they crave, but then he ensures that prayer stays mysterious, something they will still need to continue to wrestle with. A parable that I think is often misunderstood, but nonetheless a parable that refuses to allow prayer to end with the formula.

And I think that feels a lot like religion.

A rhythm that keeps me connected patterns that shape me.

A rhythm that prevents me from ever thinking I’ve figured it all out.

One is loud and obnoxious. It tells us that if God is good, then the evidence should show up in visible, measurable success. Health and wealth, (whatever that means) but fundamentally a life that is, in some tangible sense, ahead of everyone else around us. Call it the prosperity gospel if you want, or just call it what it is, a way of confusing God’s blessing with material increase.

For me, that is obviously inconsistent with the message of Jesus who famously had nowhere to lay his head (Mt 8:20).

The other way is quieter, but no less insidious. It rejects prosperity as a frame for the world and instead assumes there isn’t ever enough to go around.

However, what that means is that if something good happens over there, it must mean less over here. Blessing isn’t just being ahead of everyone else, it’s acquiring a bigger slice of a finite pie. We might not name this one as a theology, but it is. It’s a way of imagining the world as a closed system, where blessing is finite and always being redistributed.

Thing is, they might feel like opposites. One says there is more than enough for me, I just have to get it. The other says there may not be enough for me at all, so I need to fight for it. But both train us to scan the room, compare ourselves, and calculate our rank. Because underneath, they share the same root. Both approaches, the prosperity and the scarcity gospel assume that blessing is fundamentally material. Something that can be tracked, gained, or lost and once we accept that premise, everything else in our life starts to follow that trajectory.
Either we chase it, or we compete for it.
Either we assume God’s favour shows up in what we have, or we quietly start to fear that someone else having more means we’ve been left behind.

Scripture pushes us in a very different direction though.

And I think there’s an intriguing example in the story of Abraham. In Genesis 12 God has called him to Canaan (Gen 12:1), but, bad news, there’s a famine in the land (Gen 12:10). Good news, there’s food available over in Egypt. So the logic starts to take shape: That must mean I’m in the wrong place. Only so much good to go around. I better go where the provision is.

Now in a vacuum, that’s not a bad move. Abraham can’t control the weather. Food is essential. I get it. But as a mindset, that way of seeing the world bleeds into everything. And as a story I think that might be what the writers were warning us against. Because that approach carries implications we often don’t notice until they’ve already done their work on us.

Here’s a parallel.

You and a friend work at the same company, and they get a promotion. You want to be happy for them. But if you’re honest, you’re a little choked. You didn’t get it.

Is that uncomfortable? Sure. Is it reasonable? Honestly, yeah.

But watch how quickly that shifts.

This time imagine you and that same friend work at completely different companies. They get a promotion again. You still want to be happy for them. But somehow, it still feels like it means less for you.

Why?

Because once that idea takes hold, that there’s only so much good to go around, then good news that isn’t yours starts to feel like bad news for you. And once that gets its claws into us, it’s incredibly hard to shake.

Another example. Our kids are adopted.

Twelve years ago, we found ourselves finally receiving what we had waited a very long time for. We were in our late 30s when we adopted our son, into our 40s when we adopted our daughter. Before that, we had struggled with infertility for years. And when you’re in your late 30s, dealing with infertility, waiting years on an adoption list without much news, you will inevitably find yourself surrounded by an avalanche of baby announcements.

So here’s the question.

Does a friend getting pregnant have any bearing on your ovulation?

Does a baby shower affect your sperm count?

Does another announcement card in the mail do anything to move you up the adoption waitlist?

Of course not.

And yet, they’re still hard to sit through.

Because somewhere in the back of our minds, there’s a story we half-believe: there is only so much goodness to go around.

So you smile. You celebrate. You show up to the baby shower. And you do feel happy for them. But there’s that quiet, insidious voice whispering in the background: somehow this is bad news for you.

Now maybe it starts with life’s not fair.

But too often it doesn’t stay there.

And it starts to become: I’ve got to get mine.

And that is poison for your soul.

What if instead, we could shift our perspective to see blessing not as a limited resource to secure, or a promise for more of what we already have, but instead a full bodied participation in the world around us. Because if that was true then blessing could be seasons of abundance where we can share generously. But it could also be seasons of need where we learn to lean on the community that surrounds us.

Because maybe the problem was never too much or too little, but not properly grasping what God wants for us. I think blessing looks like flourishing, both for me and for my neighbour, and that has to fundamentally change my relationship to anything I could ever consider my stuff.

Recently, I got to sit with one of them. In Genesis 12, Abraham receives this famous call from God and then, almost immediately, turns around and sells out his own wife to save his own skin (Gen 12:10–20). What makes the story especially difficult is what follows. In the next chapter, it looks like Abraham gets off scot-free. Not only that, he comes out ahead financially (Gen 13:2).

How is that not addressed?

Part of the problem isn’t that the Bible ignores bad behaviour. It’s that sometimes our translations miss the cues the writers are giving us.

If you remember the story, Abraham goes down to Egypt because there is a severe famine in the land (Gen 12:10). Once there, he passes off Sarah as his sister, putting her at risk in order to protect himself. Then we read that he leaves Egypt “very wealthy” (Gen 13:2).

And that phrase is doing a lot of work.

The word translated “severe” in as “severe famine” and the word translated “very” as in “very wealthy” just a few verses later are the same Hebrew word: kābēd, meaning “heavy.” So the text could just as easily read: there was a heavy famine, and now Abraham is heavy with silver and gold.

“Wealthy” isn’t wrong, exactly. But it misses the connection.

Abraham is heavy with what he gained in Egypt. Heavy with wealth that came at a cost. Heavy with the memory of what he traded away.

Or as Victor Hamilton puts it, “A fortune has been amassed, but an opportunity for trust has been lost.”1

The narrator isn’t framing this as a reward. It reads more like a weight. A kind of penance. The story leaves us without commentary, but not without a suggestion.

The question, then, is whether Abraham will understand that. But maybe the more importnat question is whether we will.

Sometimes the line between reward and penalty is razor thin. Sometimes what looks like blessing is actually burden. And sometimes the difference isn’t particularly obvious at all.

It comes down to what we are willing to see in ourselves.

The problem is that many of us—scholars, translators, pastors, all of us shaped in one way or another by Western capitalism—read Genesis 13 and assume this is just a continuation of God’s blessing from chapter 12.

And we’re missing what the text is suggesting on the sly.

This is what happens when we don’t learn to filter for our biases. They end up filtering everything for us. And we can walk away from a story about loss, weight, and compromised trust thinking it’s about success.

And that’s a heavy mistake to carry into our lives.

This means that in one context, a word might best be translated one way in English, but in another context, a different English word might better convey that same original term. All of this explains why translating something like the Bible into English is incredibly difficult. I have a great deal of respect for the scholars who work on any of the major Bible translations.

That said, one of my biggest pet peeves is when English translations choose one English word for a term in one verse and then choose a different English word for the same term in the same passage, even when it is very clear that the Greek or Hebrew is intentionally linking those ideas together. These are callbacks. They are references meant to be heard together. When we use different English words with slightly different semantic ranges, we end up confusing or obscuring those connections for modern readers.

One of the most notorious examples of this in the New Testament is the Greek word aiōnios. Sometimes it is translated as “age,” and other times it is translated as “eternal.” While both of those meanings fall within its semantic range, they point to very different ideas in English. And translating aiōnios as “age” in one appearance and “eternal” in another, within the same passage, makes it much harder to follow the thread of the argument.

A particularly clear example of this shows up in one of Jesus’ most famous teachings, the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. This famous parable ends with the goats going away to eternal punishment, but the sheep to eternal life. (Mt 25:46)

However, the question that sparks this parable, back in chapter 24, comes when the disciples hear Jesus speak about the future and ask, when will this happen, what will be the sign of your coming, and the end of the age? (Mt 24:3) That word “age” is the key to understanding Jesus’ answer.

In English, we often read the word “eternal” in Jesus’ parable. But in Greek, the word is aiōnios, the adjectival form of aiōn, the just same word the disciples use when they ask about the end of the age. Jesus is answering their question.

The problem is that when we switch to “eternal” in chapter 25, we immediately jump to metaphysical assumptions about never-ending states of bliss or torture which is evidently not how Greek speakers, or the biblical authors, always used this word given how it was directly used in the question that lead to the parable..

In Greek thought, an aiōn was not an abstract eternity. It was a long period of time marked by some important or defining characteristic. We still hear echoes of aiōn in English today. Words like eon and era all come from this same Greek root. Homer uses aiōn to describe the life span of his great characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey for example. Their lives represent an age, just as the disciples use the word in their question.

We use language like this too. We talk about the age of King Arthur, or the age of King David. That is an aiōn. Even our word “epoch,” which also comes from Greek, originally referred to a stopping point, or the end of an aiōn. So, when we say we have entered a new epoch, what we are saying is that an old age has come to an end and a new one has begun.

At the same time, an aiōn is so significant that in some sense it is always eternal. It never fully fades away. The age of King David is still with us. We read about it. We study it. In that sense, it is eternal, just not in the way we usually mean when we hear the word “eternal” in English.

Here’s one more way to think about it. Those of us who believe in eternal life also believe in death. Life is not a flat, unchanging forever. Eternal life is eternal in the sense that it evolves and transforms. Life is so alive that even in death it becomes something new. That is often what the biblical writers mean when they talk about eternity.

That’s not the end of it thought because this way of thinking had a close parallel in Hebrew thought as well, one that informs both the disciples question and Jesus’ answer. In Matthew 24, when the disciples ask about the aiōn they are drawing on two important Hebrew ideas: olam ha-zeh and olam ha-ba. Olam ha-zeh refers to “this age,” the world as we experience it now. It includes joy and laughter, sun and love, but also suffering, sin, brokenness, and longing. When the disciples ask about the end of the age, they are asking when all of this will finally come to an end.

What they are really longing to know about though is olam ha-ba, or specifically when the age to come, will begin. This is the world the prophets imagined and the Jewish people hoped for. When will all of that start they ask?

And Jesus answers their question through a series of stories.

He talks about waking up when the age to come begins, in the parable of the wedding guests. He talks about accountability and judgment within the present age, in the parable of the talents. And he talks about a transition marked by the punishment of the age that is and the life of the age to come, in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

But importantly, when Jesus uses the word aiōnios, he is not talking about our modern idea of timeless eternity. He is speaking within a deeply Jewish imagination of the ages, the disciples have specifically asked him about.

This helps us make better sense of what Jesus says next. Because Jesus does not say that the goats go to hell. What he says is that the goats go to aiōnios punishment. Importantly, he does not use the word often translated as destruction or ruin, a word that describes where our worst choices can lead us over time. Instead, he uses the word kolasis.

Kolasis refers to punishment, suffering, or pain, but its earliest roots go back to the word kolazō stemming from agricultural use. Originally it described pruning, or cutting back a plant so that it could grow. Now by the time of the koine greek era that meaning had largely been lost but even in classical Greek the distinction was made to define kolasis as restorative rather than retributive punishment. An early extra-biblical text, the Apocalypse of Peter, even says, “Your punishment, O God, is discipline.”

Now discipline can be uncomfortable. Even pruning can hurt. But the point of kolasis is not retribution by nature. The image is restorative. The goal is still growth and healing even if that pure pruning definition is no longer active.

What the means is that when Jesus speaks of kolasis aiōnios, he is not describing eternal torture. He is describing the punishment of the age, perhaps we could even say, the discipline that brings this age to a close so that the age to come can begin. Remember the original question: when will this happen, and what will be the sign of the end of the age?

The sign will be the punishment that leads to restoration.

Now does Jesus tell us whether the goats enter into that discipline willingly? Do they accept the pruning that could heal them and welcome the correction that leads them into the age to come? Do the fight and struggle and make the experience even more difficult and prolonged than intended? Jesus doesn’t say. He simply says that the goats go on to the discipline of the age, and the sheep enter into the life of the age to come.

All we are left with then, in the end, is trust. Trust that whatever this looks like, it must somehow be for our good. And the trust to know that as we shape our lives to reflect the concerns of Jesus’ sheep we are preparing our lives for whenever the age to come arrives.

This is all very clearly a callback to Genesis, right?

If you know the four Gospels, you know they each have their own personality. Mark is stripped down and raw. It cuts straight to the chase. You get to see Jesus in Mark with almost no commentary to get in the way. I love it. John, though, John is the other side of the spectrum. John is all commentary. If Mark is story, John is speculation. If Mark is narrative, John is theology. And probably one of the best ways to think about it is that Mark is the foundation, and John is what Christianity builds on top of that story.

But what we see in John is that what Christianity builds is this conviction that the whole long story is leading us to the life of Jesus. And the life of Jesus in turn changes everything about how we read the story.

See, John does this brilliant thing where he plays with words in his opening. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And that word “word” is the Greek word logos. Now, logos means word, but it also has this rich philosophical subtext.

In Greek philosophy, logos went through a number of different eras. But by the time of the New Testament, the dominant neoplatonist framework held that the logos of something, the word of something, was more than just a way to name it. It was a way to talk about the essence of something. The very idea of a thing.

So if you pull out a canvas and you begin to paint, the logos of your painting is not just the strokes on the canvas. It’s the image. The idea that you had in your mind when you began to create. Your artistry then is your ability, (or your inability), to express the true logos of your painting through your intent and your paints.

The philosophers would say it this way: the logos was the force that invests the world with shape and form and life. Ideas become real through logos.

And John comes along and says, “Yeah, I like that.”

Because when God creates, the scale is creation itself. And so he links logos to the beginning. All of it. Everything is part of God’s intent.

But he’s doing another thing here as well, because that parallels another, even older tradition: the wisdom tradition found in the Hebrew scriptures.

Listen to Proverbs 8. This is the woman named Wisdom speaking in this poem (Prov 8:22-27). This is what she says:

The Lord brought me forth at the first of God’s works, before God’s deeds of old. I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning.

Our ears should perk up here.

When the world came to be, when there were no watery depths yet, I was given birth. Before springs overflowing with water, before the mountains were settled, I was there. Before God made the world or the fields or even the dust, there was me. I was there when God set the heavens in place, when God marked out the horizon over the face of the deep.

That line, “face of the deep,” that mention of those watery depths, those are lifted directly from Genesis, when God’s spirit hovers over the face of the deep waters of creation (Gen 1:2).

See, in Hebrew thought, wisdom is not just smarts. It’s not your test scores. Wisdom is creativity. Wisdom is your ability to make any situation, maybe even your world, what you need it to be. And so when God decides to create, it’s wisdom that personifies the divine urge in this poem about the beginning.

What John realizes is that both of these are, in some sense, sides of the same coin. The wisdom of creativity from the Hebrew tradition. Logos as the expression of an idea made real in the world from the Greek tradition. And he sees this great play on words available to him, a pun if you will, because in Genesis, God speaks creation into form with a word. And in Greek, logos is also just the regular everyday word for “word.”

And so in naming Jesus right off the bat, at the very start of his gospel, in the first line, as the capital-W Word of God, a phrase that’s used all through the scriptures but is always pointing somewhere else, at a larger story, what John is saying is: actually, all of it points here.

And yes, that’s all of scripture. But it’s all wisdom. It’s all creativity. It’s all philosophy and history. All prophecy and hope and tradition. All love points to this moment in history, when God occupies the human story to demonstrate what a human life can be at its essence, at its logos, at its most creative.

John is saying all scripture is God-breathed. It is life-giving. It’s packed full of wisdom and creativity. But that’s because it points us to Jesus. And so it’s no longer our words about God, gathered up and preserved, written down and bound together. Now it’s God’s word, alive and breathing, showing us the essence of life and the heart of love. What it looks like to be human.

Jesus is everything God needed to say to us about what it means for us to live well.

And it’s not enough to answer all of our questions. Certainly not enough to fill in all the gaps in our theology. That’s why we’re still working things out 2,000 years later. But it’s enough to look at Jesus and see the divine. There’s enough for us to look at Jesus and see how a life full of love for each other looks. There’s enough in Jesus for us to look at his life and follow his steps through the world, on our way back to God.

However, just before Jesus launches into this parable there’s a pretty fascinating scene that sets the context. Gathered around Jesus, our tax collectors and sinners. And the way this is phrased in most English translations kind of makes it sound like Luke is talking about a very specific group of those people in this moment, listening to Jesus. That is probably not primarily what the text is referring to though. A better translation is probably that these religious leaders began to see that tax collectors and sinners were being drawn to Jesus. As John Nolland suggests, “the periphrastic imperfect (“were drawing near/used to draw near”), is probably right to suggest that “the general circumstances of Jesus’ ministry rather than one particular incident are in mind.”1

Now, at the same time, it’s very possible that Jesus is specifically eating with some of those people in the moment, likely even. That’s the scene. But the way this is phrased, the concern from the religious leaders isn’t the immediate audience with Jesus. It’s the larger trend they’re observing around them. People—undesirable people—are being drawn to Jesus. And one or two, I mean, that was fine. But this is now changing the balance of their community.

That’s when they begin to mutter to themselves. That’s what Jesus overhears. And that’s worth reflecting on for a moment.

I think we’re all okay with a little bit of change. A few unexpected people in our midst from time to time. Where we start to get uncomfortable is when it starts to feel like maybe the balance is shifting around us.

And this is actually a really interesting phenomenon called social validation that extends far beyond just religion. Often we don’t actually just want the ability to have our own beliefs and make our own choices and live our own lives. What we really want is to see those choices mirrored back to us by the people around us. And so one or two people—a few people that look different, that think different, that act different from us—that’s fine. It actually helps us to reinforce that we are the norm. But if the balance even starts to feel like it’s shifting, even if it’s not anywhere close to a tipping point, but it feels like that could be an eventuality—once we start to feel like we’re not normal anymore, that can be an incredibly destabilising place. Because all of a sudden we have to ask ourselves some really uncomfortable questions. Would we really believe any of these things? Would we really act this way if it wasn’t socially reinforced for us?

This is why in times of social upheaval, there can be a very strong preservation instinct that kicks in to rigidly enforce social norms. It’s also why sometimes just the presence of difference around us can read like persecution to us. Difference does not take away our ability to live as we want, but it does take away our ability to feel like we’re normal while we do it. And often, feeling normal is actually the biggest driver in shaping what we think of as our convictions. This isn’t “concern” raised by the religious leaders isn’t a rational, or even a religious objection, it’s socially located.

And so it’s very interesting to see that in response to that discomfort, instead of giving them a technical answer, or trying to exposit scripture and explain how he interprets the law, instead of trying to meet that discomfort head-on with facts, Jesus tells a story.

He skips right past a rational answer to an irrational concern and goes straight to a story that can help uncover what they are experiencing.

Jesus opts for a parable rooted, not in reality (what kind of Sheppard would ever leave 99 sheep alone in the open country to chase down one), but in the kind of world driven by what we might wish was possible. A world where our relationships are not driven by ROI but by the absurd grace of not just acceptance, but the active welcome of those that don’t fit into our expectations of them.

The lost sheep is not a reasonable story, because it’s not addressing a reasonable objection. It’s a story designed to make us wonder about a world where are Grace for each other went far beyond our social reinforcement.

1

John Nolland, Luke 9:21-18:34, WBC 35B; (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), 770.

In response, I offer the following section from chapter 10 in my book Upside-Down Apocalypse: Grounding Revelation in the Gospel of Peace, Herald Press, 2022. (p. 163-169).

The Battle of Armageddon

Armageddon is a word that people seem to love. Surprisingly, it shows up only once in Revelation (Revelation 16:16). This presumed battle is part of the section that we refer to as the seven bowls. These are a retelling of a sort of the seven trumpets, which are a retelling of the seven seals, both of which we explored earlier. But if you can remember all the way back to the sixth trumpet, we read about a great army massing for a battle with God (9:13–19). However, that battle never happened. Instead, John was told not to write down what the voices of the seven thunders called for, and we were redirected to the witness of the Christ community that overcomes through nonviolence.

With the sixth bowl, we read about a similar scenario as all the kings of the earth prepare for a battle at a place called Armageddon. Armageddon is a compound of two Hebrew words, har and Megiddo. Har means mountain; Megiddo was a small town about sixty miles north of Jerusalem. Armageddon, as a word, simply means the mountain of Megiddo. But there are a couple of fascinating things here.

The first is that there is no such thing as the Mount of Megiddo.1 In fact, there are only the plains of Megiddo, sometimes known as the valley of Jezreel.2 There’s not even a bump or a hill to be confused with a mountain. So clearly, as he’s been doing all along, John is using this language figuratively to evoke an emotive response using “a mythical place-name.”3 It’s almost as if he’s saying, “I don’t want anyone getting fixated on geography. Don’t try to look for this on a map; we both know it doesn’t exist anyway. Start thinking, searching for connections I might be suggesting with this language.”

And once we do that, we find that Megiddo is an infamous location throughout the history of the Hebrews. In the fifteenth century bce, possibly when the Hebrews were still enslaved, the Egyptian Thutmose III fought a massive battle against an alliance of Canaanite tribes led by the king of Kadesh. This battle doesn’t appear in the Bible, because it’s pre-Israelite history. Still, we do have some ancient records that describe it in detail.4 Not so fun fact: This is the oldest known source of a body count. The battle was so huge that records indicate each army had over ten thousand troops massed for war.5 When John describes a similar conflict with God, he says that there are not twice ten thousand troops at that battle but twice ten thousand times ten thousand, as if to suggest that the Battle of Megiddo was nothing compared to this conflict.

In 609 bce, there was another great battle at Megiddo. This time, the Egyptian king Necho II and the Assyrians went to war against the Babylonians. The Hebrews, unfortunately, ended up being caught in the middle. Egypt came and said to Israel, “Can we pass through your land on our way to fight with the Babylonians?” But when Necho passed through, King Josiah traveled to meet him, and the pharaoh killed him at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29). The Hebrews were betrayed and pulled into the battle, which eventually led to their downfall, as Judah was conquered by Babylon after Babylon defeated Assyria and Egypt. The Hebrew people were taken into exile, adding to the bad memories of Megiddo.

That’s not all, though, because the judge Deborah and her military leader Barak battled the Canaanites at Megiddo (Judges 4:6–16; 5:19). Gideon went to war with the Midianites at Megiddo (Judges 7). King Saul was defeated by the Philistines on the plains of Megiddo (1 Samuel 29:1; 31:1–7). And the ancient historian Eusebius even records that the Romans set up a permanent camp at Megiddo known as “Legio in the great plain.”6 There were at least seven major historical conflicts at Megiddo that John would have been aware of.7 However, the most crucial reference might be Zechariah, who links God’s fight against the enemies of Israel to the mourning of Megiddo (Zechariah 12:9; 12:11).

The Rider on the White Horse

If this battle doesn’t happen at a physical location, how should we picture it? John helps us with that as well. We read: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war…. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God” (Revelation 19:11, 13).

This is Jesus. And here he is wielding a sword, covered in blood. Have we finally reached the violent confrontation we have waited for from page one—the Rambo-Jesus who will crush all opposition?

In a word, no. Because John turns our expectations upside down once again.

First, “justice” here is the word dikaiosune in Greek. However, in Hebrew and in Greek, this is the same word as “righteousness.” It’s actually an interesting quirk of the English language that we separate doing what is right religiously or spiritually from doing what is right in the world. This bifurcation doesn’t exist in the biblical imagination. Nor does it exist in most other languages. So yes, this rider wages war, but no, it’s not with weapons. It is with righteousness.

Next, his robe is dipped in blood even before the battle starts. Violence is revealed in the story once again—Revelation has no problem naming the world’s violence—but this violence has occurred earlier in the story. The rider’s robe is bloody, but this is not an enemy’s blood; this is the evidence of Christ’s own sacrifice.

Finally, John tells us that out of the rider’s mouth comes a sharp sword to strike down the nations (19:15). Contrary to our popular imagination, this rider does not have a sword in his hand at all. He wields a sword, but it comes from his mouth. As we have seen repeatedly in Revelation, victory is won not with weapons, war, or force but through the testimony of nonviolence (12:11).

You have to almost willfully reject the biblical witness to imagine this sword being any kind of physical weapon. The writer of Hebrews describes the words of scripture being sharper than any double-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). Isaiah, on whom John is relying heavily for the imagery, says that the suffering servant’s mouth will be like a sharpened sword (Isaiah 49:2; cf. Psalms 59:7; 64:3). Even the apostle Paul transposes the imagery of a sword for nonviolent purposes (Ephesians 6:17). In fact, all the way back in the opening cycle of Revelation, Jesus already declared that he would overcome evil with the sword of his mouth (Revelation 2:16). Any interpretation that even hints at Jesus using a weapon to kill is a complete misreading.

But there’s more.

Because not only is John turning our expectations upside down—he is also subverting even the prophetic imagination of justice.

This image of the rider on the white horse is lifted directly from Isaiah. The prophet describes the day of God’s vengeance, a day Jesus intentionally leaves out of his mandate when he quotes him (Isaiah 61:2; Luke 4:19). But when Isaiah describes that fateful day, we see a similar mysterious figure.

Who is this coming from Edom,
from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson?
Who is this, robed in splendor,
striding forward in the greatness of his strength?

“It is I, proclaiming victory,
mighty to save.”

Why are your garments red,
like those of one treading the winepress?

“I have trodden the winepress alone;
from the nations no one was with me. I trampled them in my anger
and trod them down in my wrath; their blood spattered my garments,
and I stained all my clothing.” (Isaiah 63:1–3)

Isaiah describes what we have been led to expect from a lifetime of envisioning God through the lens of human blood and war—a God who enacts justice the way we might. But as we saw in the throne room, the lion we expected has been exchanged for something surprising—the Lamb of peace. No longer are we limited to interpreting human words about God, now the very Word of God walks with us. And it is this Jesus who appears with only his testimony of nonviolence to save the day. In this moment, Jesus is both the culmination of our longing and the overturning of everything we thought to hope for.8

The pernicious idea that Jesus will come back someday, riding on a horse, galloping through town and lopping off heads, is a blatant misreading of what is going on here. It contradicts both the Lamb revealed in Revelation and the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels, and it completely misses what John is trying to do—turn our expectation of justice upside down. The painful irony is that for a book that never mentions an antichrist, misreadings of this image that diminish the nonviolence of Jesus are anti-Christ.

Armageddon is not a geographic location to find on a map. The sword is not a physical weapon Jesus wields. The blood on his garment is a picture of sacrifice, not war. This is an image of the power of the cross to overcome evil, dismantle violence, upend terror, and put right the world.

But if you’re not yet convinced, look at what happens when Jesus arrives. There’s not much of a battle.

The beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gather for war. The tension ratchets up. But without so much as a single shot, the first beast and the false prophet (this is a reference to the second beast from Revelation 13:11–17) are captured and thrown into the fire. Those who stand with evil are killed with the sword from the rider’s mouth, and the birds gorge themselves on their flesh (19:19–21).

Granted, this is pretty dark and a little bit gruesome. There’s no point in denying that. John does not want us to miss for a second the gravity of what he’s talking about here. Still, in the larger context of this letter and the way John has been using these images, this is clearly not meant to be a battle that you could place on a map or compile a body count from. This is an image of how the story of Christ disarms the destroyers of the earth (11:18).

Yes, the beast and the prophet—the power of political empire and the witness of false religion—are thrown into the fire to be destroyed. But this climactic image of judgment is reserved for abstract representations of evil,9 not its victims. Even those kings of the earth, killed by Jesus’ sword, are later welcomed into the new Jerusalem to find healing once the city descends (21:24; 22:2).10 All of this is an image of the power of Christ’s sacrifice that puts to death the way of sin in us (Romans 6:6; 1 Peter 2:24).

As scholar Loren Johns describes, “Central to the Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse is the forging of a new understanding of the means by which one conquers: that of a consistent, nonviolent resistance born of clear allegiance to God.”11

11

Johns, Lamb Christology, 183.

From the story, we can see that the wickedness culminates when the townsfolk try to violently rape two angelic visitors. But truth is, that’s probably just the final straw.

For one, God seems to have pretty much made up God’s mind before the messengers even went down to town. But the scriptures themselves seem to think this story is a lot more complicated than than that.

Sodom is very much a warning for how dark turns can lead us to dreadful places.

Here’s what I mean.

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom; listen to the instruction of our God, you people of Gomorrah! “The multitude of your sacrifices— what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
Isaiah 1:10-11 NIV11

Isaiah thinks the sin of Sodom was empty religion, sacrifice without kindness.

Then Ezekiel says:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and the needy.
Ezekiel 16:49 NIV11

Ezekiel, on the other hand, thinks the sin of Sodom was greed and carelessness for the poor.

Jeremiah adds another layer:

And among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen something horrible: They commit adultery and live a lie. They strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that not one of them turns from their wickedness. They are all like Sodom to me; the people of Jerusalem are like Gomorrah.”
Jeremiah 23:14 NIV11

Jeremiah thinks the sin of Sodom was adultery and the support of evildoers.

And then Jesus says this:

If anyone does not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that town or that home. Shake the dust off your feet. Truly, I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
Matthew 10:14-15 NIV11

Jesus thinks the sin of Sodom was failing to welcome the stranger with hospitality.

Jude is one people often jump to:

Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.
Jude 1:7 NIV11

But this one is interesting, because this English translation is doing a lot of work for us. What the passage really says is that the sin of Sodom was pursuing strange flesh. That’s the phrase in Greek. It’s heteros sarx, and somewhat ironically, that’s where we get our English word heterosexual from.

What Jude is talking about is lusting after different, strange, or in this case, nonhuman, angelic flesh. He’s talking about lusting after angels. That is the sin of Sodom.

Point being, Sodom is not a great place. The people practice empty religion. They don’t care for the poor. They are greedy and selfish. They are unfaithful to each other. They are inhospitable to strangers. They lust after anything they can find. And they try to sexually assault some angels who happen to wander into town.

This is anything but a single-issue judgment according to, well, the Bible.

And if anything, what this laundry list tells us is that Sodom and Gomorrah are used throughout the scriptures to be an image, a caricature almost, of the worst of humanity.

Like these aren’t real people. They’re comic book villains.

They’re scaled-up images of all of our failures, intended to warn us about what our worst impulses can do to us if we let them.

And for me, that does nothing to diminish the seriousness of this story. Honestly, it probably makes it more grim.

Because if this tale was just about a few bad people who did a bad thing and met a bad end, I could probably pat myself on the back, point the story at someone else, and move on with my day.

Which, honestly, is probably what a lot of us have been taught to do with stories like this. I mean, what else do you do with a story of fire and brimstone falling on a city of absolute hooligans?

But the truth is, this tale is actually about how desperately hard it is to remove yourself from God’s grace.

The Jewish scholar Nahum Sarna once argued that the scariest ideas in the ancient world was a god that you could not run away from (see Nahum N. Sarna. Understanding Genesis, 184).

The gods were vindictive and capricious. They were temperamental and unpredictable. And yet here was this LORD God, claiming not just to speak to Abraham, but to be Creator for everything and everyone.

The big question with that kind of God is: what if that kind of God turns on you one day?

What do you run to? Who do you turn to for help? What do you do if that God is not righteous?

And so the ancient Hebrews told a story about the worst city they could possibly imagine. An image of the worst of what they knew humanity could become. And they told how even that city could still be saved if just ten righteous people stood in their midst.

And the story became important to them because it said, first, evil was real. Evil was possible. And Evil would, one day, need to be made right.

But second, that story said you could not accidentally wake up on the bad side of this God.

You could not unintentionally stumble into a place where grace couldn’t find you anymore. You could not make one bad mistake and find yourself cut off from that goodness.

You can walk away from this God if you want to, but this story says that walk would take you a lifetime of effort to accomplish.

And even then, God would still gladly stand before one good man and hear why you deserve yet another chance.

I think at times we have read and told these stories as if fire and brimstone are waiting at the drop of a hat. As if judgment is lurking behind every misstep. As if God actually wants you to fail so God can pounce.

When everything in the Abraham story, including the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, is reminding us of exactly the opposite.

That God is slow to anger and abounding in grace.

And it is this realization of who God is that sits at the core of this journey we call faith.

Because to believe is not just to believe that God exists. That can be a terrifying realization.

To believe is to slowly come to believe that God is actually good.

And that teaches us to read, even the uncomfortable stories, in ways that credit God with the righteousness God has shown. If we ask ourselves why ancient peoples told these stories and what it taught them about their God, then the clearer we will come to see the grace that drives the story forward, toward Christ.

For most of my Christian life, the answer was reasonably simple. The word of God was the Bible. That big book I have a bunch of copies of on my shelf. (My son came home from school recently and told me he got a new book to read. He seemed pretty excited, so I asked what it was. He said, and I quote, “Well, it starts with the word the, but that’s all I can remember.” I asked if it was the Bible. It wasn’t. He also didn’t think pastor Dad was very funny. I do, but that’s fine.)

Still, for most Christians, the word of God has long signified this collection of 66 books and letters gathered together and bound into two testaments. And there’s good reason for that. The scriptures themselves talk about the word of God constantly. “Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for my feet, a light unto my path” (Ps 119:105). Or Isaiah 40:8: “The grass withers and the flowers fail, but the word of our God endures forever.” Jesus regularly talks about the word of God too. He warns in Mark 7:13 about how we can nullify it by weighing it down with heavy burdens we put on each other. He speaks about how blessed we are when we hear the word of God and then actually live it. (Lk 11:28)

So the word of God is itself a very common idea within the word of God.

But here’s the thing. In all those references, there’s a subtle nuance worth noticing: they are, each of them, in our Bible, and they all refer to the word of God, and yet they all seem to be referring to something other than the Bible.

When the psalmist writes “Your word, O Lord, is a lamp to my feet,” he’s not talking about the words he just wrote down. I mean, that would be a little arrogant. It’s a nice poem and all, but no. He’s talking about something else. In fact, every single time you come across a reference to the word of God in the Bible, you will find that the writer is speaking about some other word, some reality beyond their own text.

Take Paul’s line in Second Timothy, one of the most famous statements about God’s word anywhere in God’s word: “All scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16).

Now, what does all scripture mean here? It certainly doesn’t mean the line he just wrote. The New Testament didn’t even exist when Paul sat down to write a letter to his young protégé Timothy. And he certainly never imagined his letter catching on the way it did, eventually being considered scripture itself. Paul is referring to the Hebrew scriptures, reminding Timothy to study them diligently.

(Sidenote: the only real argument for 2 Timothy 3:16 including Paul’s writing as God-breathed is that the text of 2 Timothy is pseudepigraphal and the later writer is extending the concept to the genuine letters of Paul.)

Still, there it is. The word of God is the Hebrew Bible. We should all give up shellfish and follow the Levitical law from now on.

Well, no. Because what you find in scripture is that the idea of the word of God keeps evolving.

The psalmist may have the commands of God, the Torah, in mind. Jesus speaks of the law and the prophets and not one word falling away (Mt 5:17-18). Paul says all scripture is God-breathed, meaning he’s adding the ketuvim, the writings, to the law and the prophets. But by the time of the early church and the book of Acts, we start to get references to the story of Jesus also being called the word of God.

Acts 6:7: “The word of God spread, and the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly.” Acts 8:14: “When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to go and see them.” Acts 11:1: “The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that even the Gentiles had received the word of God.”

Now, these can’t just be references to the Hebrew scriptures, because all of these stories are about people converting to the way of Jesus. And they can’t be references to the New Testament as we have it, because that doesn’t exist yet. It’s actively being written when these words were written.

Instead, just like we see all through scripture, this term the word of God refers not to some specific book on the shelf but to the ongoing, unfolding story of God alive in the world around us.

From the moment God spoke the universe into existence, to when God handed the law to Moses, to when God communicated through the prophets, to when God came and was born and lived and died and lived again, to when God’s Spirit animated and moved the good news of Jesus out and into the world through the church. All of it. The entire Bible is the story about the word of God.

And I think that’s why I find myself endlessly fascinated with this book we call the Bible. It’s why I’ve spent most of my adult life studying it academically and vocationally and in large chunks of my personal spare time. The very idea that this collection of stories has fascinated humanity for thousands of years, across different eras and civilizations and cultures, compels me to think that there is a store of wisdom here worth mining.

In fact, it makes me think that there’s life to be found in this book.

But that life is found not on the shelf. It’s found in where the story leads us to.

And the scriptures are not confused about this. Paul says in Colossians that the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), the divine reality that has existed from before there was anything, that invisible truth is now present in history because, quote, “all the fullness of deity lives and breathes in Jesus” (Col 1:19). Similarly, the writer of Hebrews says that the life of Jesus is “the exact representation of God’s character” (Heb 1:3). The image there is the idea of a coin stamped or pressed into metal. The writer is saying that looking at Jesus shows us exactly what God is like.

Never anywhere in scripture do the scriptures claim that kind of clarity for themselves.

They point uniquely to Jesus that way.

So all through scripture, you keep hearing this term, the word of God, pointing at something else, the larger story of God present and unfolding. But now, in the light of Jesus, looking back at the love and the selflessness of the cross, the church starts saying things like: actually, I think that was it.

The divine has always been speaking. We can trust that God always will. But now God has said everything God needs to say.

The Word was with us.

And there are so many things to distract us, right? Politics and power and even theological tangents about how to interpret obscure commands in the Bible. What does God think about circumstance A or scenario B? And all of that is interesting, fascinating actually, even good, assuming we don’t get lost in it. But scripture is there to consistently, gently guide us back to the realization that everything God needed to say is present to us in the way that Jesus lived.

Remember that line from Second Timothy: “All scripture is God-breathed.” Paul goes on to say that all scripture is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16–17). So again, Paul specifically says that scripture is there to point us towards something. And that something is the way of being in the world that is brought to life in Jesus.

And even that phrase God-breathed that Paul uses. That’s the word theopneustos in Greek, and it refers to God’s breath, literally. It’s not talking about God dictating scripture. It’s talking about God speaking life, breathing life into us through scripture.

God-breathed is a word picture. And it’s actually quite a familiar one from the scriptures themselves. Remember back in Genesis, God breathes into the dust of the earth and humanity comes alive (Gen 2:7). Or then in Ezekiel, God breathes into the dry bones of Israel and the nation springs back to life (Ezek 37:1–14). That’s because theopneustos is an image of the life-giving divine breath that animates and sustains us. The story of God in scripture is like the breath in your chest right now, says Paul.

But all of this is why the prologue of John is such an important text in Christianity. It keeps us fascinated by scripture but centred on the way of Jesus.

Because all scripture is God-breathed. All scripture is the story about the word of God.

But Jesus is that final Word.

That’s it. That’s the theological origin story. A guy in a cell, riffing on what he sees.

But here’s what makes the moment interesting. That Roman guard isn’t just a guy doing his job. He’s the physical embodiment of every misshapen structure and imperial authority that put Paul behind bars because of his convictions. And so Paul looks at this guard, all that metal and leather and state-sanctioned power, and says something remarkable:

You’re not my enemy.

My battle is not with you. My battle is with everything that has captured you. All the trappings that have covered you with armour you think defines you. And therefore, my armour should be the opposite of all of that.

Now, one of the mistakes I see sometimes in sermons and commentaries is that we get way too fancy with this metaphor. Way too specific.

The belt isn’t just truth. It’s a Roman military belt with metal plates representing accountability partners. The shoes? Limited edition Gospel Jordans. High tops of evangelism with tread patterns that represent spiritual traction in a slippery cultural climate. And the helmet of salvation? That guards your thoughts, which means you shouldn’t watch that show, or that one, or that one. Honestly, just cancel Netflix when you get home.

We are doing way too much here.

In fact, over in First Thessalonians, Paul uses similar imagery except there faith and love are the breastplate, and hope and salvation are the helmet. The specific assignments shuffle around depending on the letter. Sometimes it’s just not that deep.

The significance here isn’t the details. It’s not about driving this down into allegory. It’s about a contrast of worldviews.

Your armour looks like war. My armour looks like peace.

And remember, that’s what Paul has been doing all through the letter to the Ephesians.

Victory then peace. That’s the Roman playbook. You support the empire’s ambitions, and eventually you’ll reap the rewards.

But no. Paul’s been saying the opposite from the very first lines. Empire is insatiable. It will use you up on the promise of one day and then spit you out. War is self-perpetuating. Grace is the only way to peace. That’s how Paul opens the letter. (grace and peace, Ephesians 1:2)

And yes, somehow grace and peace is the truth of the universe, but it all seems too good to be true. How could that possibly work? And so Paul writes: “With all wisdom and understanding, God made known to us the mystery of this plan. (Eph 1:8)”

Except that’s not how we imagined God, is it? Our stories tell us God would be a conqueror. Just like us. That God would demand tribute, just like we might if we had the power to do it. (Just read the actual verse from Ps 68:18 that Paul modifies in Ephesians 4:8.)

But the God revealed in Jesus is not like that, Paul argues. What does he ascended mean except that first Christ descended to the lowest regions (Eph 4:9). Or, to quote from his letter to the Philippians: “He who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage, but rather he made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant (Phil 2:6-7).”

And now we find Paul writing about the image of armour and weapons on display in front of him, keeping him in prison, all so that we might be fitted with “the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace (Eph 6:15).”

See, everything about this closing image — everything in this letter, in fact — is all about saying that if you can believe Jesus is the Christ, and if you can trust that through Christ the world is being healed, then everything about anything you’ve ever been taught will slowly need to be turned upside down. Including your image of God as warrior.

What makes you unique and different from those around you? That’s not a liability. It’s a gift (Eph 4:4-7).

What makes you strong is not your independence. It’s your reliance on the community that surrounds you (Eph 4:11-16).

And the people around you, even those who might try to harm you at times, they’re not really your enemies any more than the guard keeping me in this cell is mine. It is the structures and systems of injustice that have them trapped in their own cycles of violence. That’s what we need the courage to oppose (Eph 6:12).

But the way we do that is not by armouring up and weaponizing our faith against anyone else. It’s by reimagining the very concept of victory: seeing peace not as the benefit that comes after war, but as the very path we walk to achieve what we want to see in the world.

If you believe the way is Jesus, then slowly everything begins to change. Because what Paul is arguing is that peace is the way we get to the kingdom of God.

And that is the beginning of good news in our world.

“Abraham looked up, and there in the thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. So he went over and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead.”

Gen 2:22

So all is well that ends well. Right?

Well, no. Isaac’s life is spared, sure. But can we honestly say the same about his relationship with his father? About Isaac’s mental health after this experience? What kind of psychological trauma does this inflict on a child who now knows his father might murder him whenever his deity demands it?

That’s not just idle speculation.

The rabbis have noted since antiquity that Abraham and Isaac never speak again anywhere in Scripture. Isaac’s last recorded words to his father are hauntingly simple: “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” (Gen 22:7)

Later, in Genesis 24, Abraham is old, perhaps estranged from his son, and he calls in his most trusted servant. He makes him promise to go and find Isaac a wife. Abraham doesn’t speak to Isaac directly. He doesn’t guide him himself.

Is that because there is no relationship left to speak of? No access, no trust, no space for reconciliation? Too much damage done?

We can’t say for sure. We’re speculating.

But I’ll be honest. This would be a hard one to forgive dad for.

So what do we do with a story like this?

There are many ways Jewish and Christian writers have engaged it over the centuries, but there are two ideas that have become important for me as I sit with this story. One is contextual. The other is theological.

For the contextual piece, I turn to Nahum Sarna. (see Nahum N. Sarna. Understanding Genesis, 184) One of the problems with a God like the God of Genesis is that this God is unlike any of the other gods people knew at the time. This God was uncontained and inescapable.

And that meant the scariest thing imaginable was to believe in this God while remaining unconvinced of this God’s goodness.

With other gods, you could at least run away. You could change allegiances. You could find a bigger god to be on your side if things went bad. This God was different.

That’s why Sodom matters in the story. It teaches us that this God is not unpredictable, not a loose cannon. This God is far more gracious than anyone expected.

But that raises a terrifying question. What would such a God want in return?

Across ancient cultures, sacrifice was assumed. When things were good, you sacrificed to say thank you. When things were bad, you sacrificed to repent. And when things got really good or really bad, when the gods seemed unstable, the solution was always the same. Raise the stakes.

In parts of the ancient Near East, that meant sacrificing not just what you loved, but your very future.

That’s why Abraham’s first response to “sacrifice your child” isn’t shock. This is what the gods demand. That’s the test as Abraham understands it. Give up what is most precious to you. Give up the promise itself.

But every test has two parts.

There’s the test of obedience. Will you do what God asks? Yes or no.

But there’s also the test of hearing. Did you understand what God actually wanted in the first place?

I wonder if what God wanted here wasn’t obedience, but a fight.

There’s an old Monty Python sketch.

This guy walks up to a table, and there’s a sign on the table that says, $1 for a debate. The first man pays and sits down, and the two men just sit there staring at each other.

Finally, the first man says, “I paid you for a debate.”

And the man behind the desk says, “No, you didn’t.:

The first responds, “Yes, I did. I just gave you the money.”

No, you didn’t.

Yes, I did.

No, you didn’t.

Yes, I did.

Finally, the first man says, “okay. I see what’s going on here. This is not a debate. A debate is where you present an argument and I present a logical response, and then we wrestle through the implications.”

And the man behind the desk says, “No, it isn’t.”

Now in true Monty Python fashion, this goes on for about thirty minutes back and forth. But what if the first part of the test is the yes or no section, the scantron component where God says, will you do what I ask? Yes or no?

And the second part of the test is the debate, the essay section where Abraham is supposed to argue with God just like he did when he’s standing before God facing down Sodom.

What if Abraham was supposed to say, “I would do anything you ask, but you would not ask for this. Would not the judge of all the earth do what is right?” (see Gen 18:25)

Isn’t it strange that Abraham argues fiercely for the lives of strangers in Sodom, yet resigns himself so quickly to the death of his own son?

I don’t think Abraham passes the test here. I think God has to step in and pass it for him.

Because the real question isn’t how far Abraham will go to please God. The question is whether Abraham understands God at all.

And at this moment, he doesn’t.

Even after everything he’s experienced, Abraham still can’t imagine a God who doesn’t want to take what he loves most. And that problem hasn’t gone away.

Does God desire obedience? Yes. But does God demand obedience for obedience’s sake?

I think God says, “Please.”

(FTR God actually says please in Gen 2:22 when he asks Abraham to “take his son.”)

God desires that we learn to listen. That we hear the divine voice for our own good and sometimes that means pushing back against what we’ve been led to believe about God.

Sometimes it means defying expectations placed on us by others.

Sometimes it means denying ourselves something we want because we’ve listened closely enough to know where it leads.

And sometimes it means allowing God to shatter our very imagination of God.

Abraham knows this God is different. He’s willing to call on that imagination when it’s directed toward others. He argues passionately for Sodom. But when that same conviction is needed for himself, for his child, Abraham reverts back to the old gods. The petty, vindictive, temperamental deities of his ancestors.

He becomes the scolded child again, doing what he’s told, rather than the man who knows in his bones who this God really is.

I think this story exists so that when the Hebrews were tempted to return to those old imaginations, to believe this God was just like all the rest, it would stand as a warning. This God will never allow that. Abraham is brought to the edge of his most despairing imagination of the divine precisely so humanity would never return there.

We know now that God never wanted sacrifice, child or otherwise. That’s why the prophets say, over and over again, “Even though you bring me burnt offerings, I will not accept them. Let justice roll down like a river.” That’s Amos 5:24.

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire.” That’s the Psalm 40:6.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” That’s Hosea 6:6.

But Abraham stands at the very beginning of the story, in a world shaped by myth and memory of gods who embodied storms and floods and chaos. Of course the gods would take what you love most.

So the test is this: do you understand who I am yet?

And Abraham’s answer is no.

“I think you’re going to have to show me.”

That’s why this story was told. Not because Abraham is the hero, but because God is. This story permanently sets stakes in the ground and says there are lines that cannot be crossed. And more than that, it begins a long process where God patiently refines humanity’s imagination of the divine.

Stripping away misconceptions. Peeling back biases. Until one day we come face to face with the goodness of God in the birth of an infant who shows us what peace actually looks like.

Here’s the hard truth. There are things you and I believe about God right now that are wrong. And they’re wrong because they don’t look like Jesus.

One day, in God’s graciousness, they will be stripped away.

That’s the test of the journey. To let our preconceptions fall until all that remains is grace and peace.

God begins that story here. And God continues it throughout Scripture, patiently drawing us closer to who God has always been.

watch the 12min clip here

And Paul’s whole approach is not about denigrating that openness, but in recognizing that this pursuit itself is the start of divine knowledge.

Holy Ground

I want to tell you a different story to illustrate this. It comes from the Hebrew scriptures in the book of Second Kings.

There’s a man named Naaman, and he’s the favorite general of the king of Aram. And, sadly, he contracts leprosy, and no one can help him. But Naaman knows this Israelite woman, and she’s told him stories about her God. So he asks permission of his king to go talk to the king of Israel. The king of Aram agrees, sends him with a royal letter and a bunch of gold and silver to pay the God of Israel to heal his general. When he gets there, king of Israel is like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for you. I can’t fix you. Get out of here.

Thankfully, the prophet Elisha hears about this, and sends a messenger telling Naaman to come and see him. But when Naaman packs up and heads over to Elisha’s, Elisha is busy that day and so instead of meeting with Naaman, he just sends a servant of his with a message, go cleanse yourself in the Jordan River and you’ll be healed.

Naaman thinks this is silly, but one of his servants is like, listen, we have come this far. We’ve traveled all this way. It’s not gonna hurt to take a bath.

And so he does, and of course, he’s healed. Naaman goes back to Elisha to say thank you. He tries to give him all the gold that he’s brought from the king, but the prophet rebuffs the offer, says I don’t need any payment. So Naaman asks for one more thing.

He asks for some dirt.

In fact, as much dirt as he can carry with the two mules that he’s got with him. His plan is he’s going to take that dirt back to Aram. He’s going to make his own personal plot of holy land where he will worship the Lord. Now, Elisha thinks this is a great idea. So he says, sure.

But as he’s about to leave, Naaman has one more request for the prophet. He says,

“May the Lord forgive your servant for this one thing: But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I have to bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.”

2 Kings 5:18 NIV11

And this where we might expect Elisha to have finally had enough. This foreigner wanted healing, he wanted dirt, and now he wants permission to bow down before other gods? You might expect Elisha to blow a gasket and tell him to get out. But that isn’t what happens. Elisha simply says, “Go in peace” (2 Kings 5:19).

It appears, to me at least, that what this tells us is that the God of the Bible has a lot more grace for our spiritual confusion than we sometimes have for each other. That God, in fact, knows we are often confused. That for the most part, God knows we are spiritually impoverished. That God accepts that a great deal of our spiritual lives will be muddling through and doing our best while leaning on grace to carry us.

I think sometimes we imagine that precision is what matters most to God, when very clearly throughout the scriptures, it is our intent that seems to rule the day. Theological precision in the pursuit of power will have you no closer to the divine. But what I see is that fumbling around on borrowed land, that will bring you to the very presence of God.

Halal vs Vegetarian

Another story. My kids have made great friends with this family that lives near us.

In fact, they live right across the alley behind us. And that means that the group of them are back and forth between the houses multiple times a day. What’s interesting is that this family is Muslim. And that means that when all the kids are over at our house and we bring out anything to eat, the kids, may not old enough to know all the rules, but they know they have to ask if the food is halal. I don’t always know. Sometimes I gotta Google it. But we do make our best to make sure it’s all above board for them.

What’s been really interesting to watch is how my kids have started to take the initiative for their friends. So rather than grabbing snacks from the cupboard and watching their friends see if they can partake, what my kids will now do is ask if something is halal from Rachel and I before they even bring it out in front of their friends. And actually, it works both ways because my kids have their own dietary restrictions. They’re vegetarian, and I’ve been able to watch our neighbors take the same initiative to make sure that my kids have options lined up with our convictions at their house.

Honestly, it’s quite lovely to watch all these kids looking out for each other in this very simple and yet profound way. Now as a Christian, do I think that any of these dietary restrictions, on either side of the aisle, actually really matter to God all that much? Objectively, I’d say no. In the words of Acts 10:15, do not call anything impure that God has made clean. Subjectively though, I think God is deeply pleased to watch these kids care for each other, look out for each other, respect the convictions of the other.

Back to Mars Hill

That’s respect is where Paul starts on Mars Hill. I’ll paraphrase Acts 17:22-28 here.

“I can see you’re very religious. I can tell you take all of this seriously. As a Hebrew, I’ll be honest, it all seems kind of absurd to me just as my ideas probably do to you, but the very fact that you have a statue to an ‘unknown god ‘tells me this. You are as interested in finding God as I am.

Except here’s the thing. God is not made. God made us. God is creator. Therefore, God can’t be found through what we build, can’t be found through any of these statues at all.

But then you already know this. See, here’s the thing. I’ve read your poets. I’ve been learning from your wisdom. ‘In God, we live and move and have our being.’ That’s your Cretian philosopher, Epimenides, Right?

‘We are God’s offspring.’ That’s your Sicilian stoic, Aratus, isn’t it?”

What’s interesting is that the philosophers want to debate faith with this bird brained fool who’s wandered into town. Paul, though, he’s not interested in any of that.

And so immediately, when they offer him the stage, he flips the script. I’m not here to find our differences. I’m here because I’m searching for common ground to start from. Debate is what pulls us apart. Conversation, that’s when we start with what we share, and we build bridges toward where we can move together.

Now, hear me. I’m not arguing that Paul doesn’t have strong convictions, or that he doesn’t think their differences matter all that much? No. Paul is absolutely going to try to convince these folks to see the way the world he does. He just knows instinctively that if they can start with what they share and build from there, then eventually, when they do reach where they disagree, well, maybe there’ll be enough tether. An adequate relationship with enough trust to actually hold them together even in their disagreement.

Because, just like my kids, once we care for each other, once we understand each other, once we are committed to looking out for each other regardless of our difference, what we ultimately find is that, honestly, we’re all just muddling our way through this thing we call faith, and the best way that we can do that is together.

Conviction, disagreement, difference, even debate. None of those things are bad. In fact, they all have an incredibly important place to play in our lives. But a generative faith starts not with where we can eke out a win, and instead from the place of searching out our common ground and building bridges that allow our differences to actually be held in relationship.

Now, does that mean if you do it this way, eventually, you’re gonna get your way, and in the end, everyone will agree with you? No. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. This isn’t about strategy.

It’s about shaping our spirituality in the generosity of the God who understands just how deep our spiritual confusion runs. Who knows that sometimes we simply need some borrowed ground to pray on to reminds us just how wide the river of grace really is for all of us.