From the Lectionary for 26 May 2024 (Trinity Sunday, Year B)

Romans 8:14-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Matthew 28:16-20 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

~

"The Church gives us on this Sunday the reading from the end of Matthew's Gospel, just the last four verses, where we get very clear reference to “in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.” What I'd like to do with you is explore a little bit about this, the reality of the Trinity. We all know that it's a mystery, which means that it's a way of talking about something that is so clear, so huge, so alive, that it's difficult for us with our limited vision to see. It doesn't mean that it is in itself something that is unclear, it means that its clarity is such that it's rather beyond our capacity to get things clear.

"And that's what i want to bring out, just some little hints of why and how this is such a wonderful doctrine for us, or dogma if you like, something that opens up rather than closes down discussion of all talk about God, [or] makes talk about God something nonsensical. Because it contains within it some very important hints for the opening up of reality for us. That's why I think that it's good Trinity Sunday comes, if you like, immediately after Pentecost Sunday, so at the end of the whole cycle of salvation - started in Advent, concluding with the Ascension, and then finally brought to life in our midst with Pentecost - we then have Trinity Sunday [which is] the wrap-up, if you like. It's the narrative condensed into its briefest form. But it is a narrative, and I want to bring that out.

"Okay, so here's my ... thumbnail way of talking about the Holy Trinity. You have God the Creator of everything that is, one God. So far that's easy, if you like. Either you believe in God or you don't. If you do, one god is not really a problem - one not in the sense of numerical one, but one in the sense of there are no more than this utterly unmentionable other who is beyond any of our numerical and sense of being, because so much more than any of, we can only think of one as a number as God, of whom we are small symptoms, we and everything that is is a small symptom.

"Okay, well so far so good, but that doesn't actually help us have a handle on anything much. So god may be, you know, a spaghetti monster, or more like a piece of basalt rock, or lord alone knows. If you just say 'god' just like that the question arises: what criterion on earth do we have for talking about god? What's our criterion for talking about god, and how on earth do we know whether we're right? When we talk about Jesus, and we say Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, or the Logos, we're saying that Jesus is God's criterion for God. The Patristic Fathers would use words like God's word, God's self-understanding, or something like that.

"Why do I use the word criterion? Well, because I think that it actually helps us not only think of this in a psychological sense, as though God were some sort of mind, but actually in an interactive sense. If you wish to conduct a trade negotiation with someone, you send an ambassador. You give that ambassador powers. That ambassador effectively becomes your criterion for dealing with the group that is being negotiated with, and the more authority you give to that ambassador or that person, the more that person has your total confidence, the more that ambassador is free to exercise his or her discretion in the negotiating process. [...] You would [say], “This person represents me completely, he is my criterion for who I am. It's exactly how I understand myself to be, and how he exercises that role is me exercising that role.” [...] That's what we're saying: Jesus is the criterion of God, who is God. There are no other bits of God. ...

"The criterion for God is God, so the claim that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity is: Jesus is God's criterion for God, who is God. And what we have in all the Gospels in one way or other is a way of pointing out this is exactly who Jesus is. In today's gospel as you would have noticed it's again done narratively with Jesus saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” That was what he had achieved in his lifetime, in his life leading up to and into his death, he had become the criterion for God. That was the whole purpose of his coming amongst us as a human being, to establish forever the criterion for God, which is God amongst us, and then breathing that into us so that we, from his authority, from the criterion, are able to take something forth.

"And this is the thing about the criterion: God has a criterion who is God, but the criterion can be difficult to understand. We might, in any relationship with the criterion, and we might think, okay, the criterion who's come amongst us is a hard task master, a judge. We can misinterpret any number of things in ways that screw up our relationship with the criterion, we can fail to understand the criterion. That's the thing about humans and criterion, literally everything ever since we became symbolic animals is capable of being interpreted one way or another, things can stand for other things, we became capable of telling lies in ways that our nearest animal cousins can't, we became capable of fooling ourselves in ways that they can't, we also became capable of learning an immense amount more. So we have God's criterion for God, and then we have God's interpretation of God's criterion for God, which is what we call the Holy Spirit.

"The third person of the Trinity is the one who comes amongst us and interprets who the criterion is for us, always for us - that's the term advocate, the defence counsellor which we looked at a bit last week. It's the interpretation of God's criterion for God, for us, so as to enable us to become sons and daughters, children of God. Beware that problem of translation since the Pauline text we have as a second reading, which here is translation the first reference is translated: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God,” and it puts that so as to avoid the word 'son' because it's a sexist word for us. That's not how it's meant by St Paul. Sonship referred to equality rather than to gender at the time, it means that you're “on equal footing with,” that's the purpose of the word 'son'.

"So our adoption as quote-unquote sons is not our adoption into a patriarchal masculinist form of being, ... it's our transformation into equality. That's the key sense that's going on there: our adoption into actually becoming equal. That's the purpose, that's why the interpreter who is God, God's interpretation of God who is God, is equal with God. And because that one moves us from within and transforms us from within, that one is making us “Son,” equal, we would say son or daughter. Children is not such a helpful term because it always implies a minority, for us it's the word by which we refer to minors, and the whole purpose of this is that it's not being a minor in the presence of God, it's being equal, and that's something very important.

"So, God, God's criterion for God, and God's interpretation of God's criterion for God, each one of which is God, each one of which is equal, and on the inside of which we are being brought to life. And this is, if you like, this is the interpretive reality: the interpretation of God's criterion for God is love.

"The Holy Spirit is building us up, interpreting us into being. Why do I say 'interpreting us'? Because we are narrative beings. It's because we are both capable of telling lies and telling the truth that the Spirit - who's able to work through, get through, every single crevice of our capacity for honesty, dishonesty, fooling ourselves, telling the truth, telling lies, presenting ourselves falsely, etc, etc - [to] get through to the cut between 'the quick and the marrow' ...

"The Holy Spirit is able to narrate us into being, it's the in-between God that enables the 'I' that is 'I Am' of Jesus to be reproduced in us, so that we become the son, literally The Son. That's our I, the I of each one of us - different, diverse, born in different times, countries, with a whole lot of different qualities - being narrated into being by the one incredibly rich interpreter, who is the Wisdom of God, who's able to explain, orchestrate, make symphonic, everything into being. Us being taken out of the spirit of servility, of slaves, and turned into those friends who share this wonderful adventure that we're on."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Trinity Sunday 2021" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYLnVCD75gI)

[For discussion and reflections on all of the lectionary texts for this week, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/trinityb/]

From the Lectionary for 19 May 2024 - Pentecost Sunday, Year B

Acts 2:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

John 15:26-27 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.”

John 16:13-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

~

"Here I would like to make a brief observation concerning the meaning of the gift of the Holy Spirit. If we read the famous chapters 14-16 of John’s Gospel, something will be noted which is very similar to the account which I am proposing to you. We see God himself, as a human being, giving his Creating Spirit to human beings as a consequence of his going to death so that we be led into all truth. That is to say, the role of the defense attorney, the Paraclete, and the role of opener up of all truth ... and the role of making us participants in bringing Creation into being on the same level as Jesus, are the same role.

[...]

"In the model which I am sketching out, and which I hope to be in harmony with the Johannine witness, we don’t get to receive the divine “eye” or “insight,” so as to speak, by an intellectual leap outside the human process of discovery. Rather it is from within the process of the forgiving overcoming of group violence that we are carried to discovering all truth. Which is to say, that through the gift of the Holy Spirit we get to participate actively as conscious and knowing beings within God’s own creative act."

- James Alison, On Being Liked, pg. 58

~

"I want to stand back a little and think of the feast itself. We're inclined to think of the Holy Spirit as being something that is sent. You know, God the Father did something and then Jesus said something and they between them somehow sent the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit then gets to be, if you like, a third thing, something sent. And I want us to stand back just a moment from that and say: no, there is something about the sending of the Holy Spirit which makes the word "send" very inappropriate. Because we are talking not about a messenger, we're talking about God. We're talking about the protagonism that is God, the one who sends us, the sender if you like.

"When Jesus talks to the disciples in the upper room in John's Gospel, he says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And then he breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. The breathing of the Holy Spirit is the sending. There is all the dynamism and protagonism of God. God is the starter, the initiator, the beginner of all this. We are all secondary in the light of the Holy Spirit. When we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit this does not mean that we become the captors, as it were, of this particularly nice gift, the gilded cages in which this wonderful bird sings. No, it means that we start to be taken over by the creative Spirit of God. In other words, we become sent.

"I want to bring that out because it helps us understand something of the amazement and the excitement and the oddness of what's going on in the Pentecost reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which is that Jesus had told them that something was going to happen, he told them about power coming from on high, he told them about the promise of his Father. And yet, what came was a form of protagonism, a form of initiative that was vastly outside and more and beyond anything they could possibly have come up with. It was enormously more powerful. It was not only turning them into the beginnings of the New Temple which meant the sign of the coming in of the New Creation, because the whole point of the temple was that it would be a sign of the Creator, completing creation.

"The whole point of the Rite of the Atonement was that it helped inaugurate the new creation. All of this: the sign of the coming in of the Creator, the complete undoing from within of everything that had screwed up human togetherness, by the undoing of Babel, the unconfusing of tongues. Babel just means confusion; here in the Gospel text and the text from Acts where it says they came together and were bewildered. Actually, it says they came together and were confused. This is Luke's pun, this is the undoing of the confusion of faith. And they're discovering the non-unitary, the wonderful diversity, orchestrated together of language in which each of us from within our mother tongue can learn how to speak the truth. And how God can in fact speak the truth through us and speak us into being, from every nation, culture, tribe, without any over against. This is a huge initiative by God, the undoing of a falsely entrapped creation and it's being  opened up into the fullness of creation.

"So that's something that we usually forget. We usually talk about the Holy Spirit as though it was something somewhat less than God. A kind of a tame version of God. And what I want to say is: no, it's us being introduced onto the inside of the life of God as humans. In other words, God having agreed to be Godself at a human level for us, that that's what Jesus had achieved. That's why Jesus is so keen that we understand that the only access to the Father is in him. Everything that is in the Father he is bringing to us, and everything that he is bringing to us is now available to us in the Spirit, on our level - sideways, horizontally. That God, the dwelling place of God, is with humans.

[...]

"[In John 15:15, Jesus] said something which is not in today's Gospel, which we had a few days ago: “I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does not know what the master is doing. But I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Everything I have made known. In other words, I've opened up knowledge to you. I've opened up the knowledge of what really is for you, everything that I've heard from my Father.

"And then today, just a little later on, [in John 16:13]: “he will not speak on his own,” - the Spirit who's coming upon you, it's going to be the same initiative as mine, which is the same initiative as the Father's - “but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you.” So, “I have spoken to you what I have heard, I made it known to you, I've made known to you what I've heard” [15:15; and] “He will speak whatever he hears and he will declare to you.” [16:13].

"So, what we're getting is, if you like, the continuation of Jesus making things known to us through the Spirit. Which is bearing the whole of Jesus's life and death, keeping that whole dynamic alive for us to share in and living. And that this is what is being made available to us as something friendly, just as a master doesn't tell friends what it's about, but friends share what they've heard and share what is true about what they've heard so as to open up for other friends. That's what this talk of hearing means: that this gift of the Spirit, all the power and glory of God coming at the level of us, is a friendly opening up, [of] the reality of creation, of everything that is, as something profoundly friendly to us."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bDtRSUUQEM)

[Source of James Alison quote from "On Being Liked" and for discussion of all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/pentecostb/]

From the Lectionary for 12 May 2024 (Ascension Sunday)

Mark 16:1-7 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Acts 1:6-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

~

"[I]n Mark's resurrection account there is a little hint of the Ascension. Here Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to the tomb. As they entered the tomb they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed. That's all it says: sitting on the right side. So here is the new Holy of Holies with an angel sitting on the right side. This symbolizes that the One who is not here, is in fact now sitting on the right-hand side of God. That's the message of the Ascension, that the Son of Man who has performed the sacrifice is now enthroned at God's right hand. That fulfils the prophecy in ... Daniel 7 which explains exactly how this was going to happen.

"So I think that an earlier generation would have picked up that this was a reference to everything having been fulfilled, but because we've got rather more used to, if you like, the helicopter imagery, we're less aware of what is meant by the Ascension. We think of it much more in terms of physical liftoff than how it would have been considered by the earliest readers of Mark, by the earliest Christian thinkers. Because it seems both in Mark and in Luke's account that they are thinking of ascension, of ascent, of lifting up, much more in terms of the throne visions of the Holy Place in the temples, starting with Isaiah's which is very clearly referenced in Luke's account.

"So here in Luke's account, we have, after Jesus has interacted with his disciples after his resurrection, he's told them that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit will come upon them and he's going to send them to the rest of the world. And as he said this he was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their side. The same verb, lifted up, is used to describe the vision of Isaiah in the year the King Uzziah died, this is Isaiah 6: “I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple, and the house was filled with smoke.” Smoke meaning clouds of incense. So here we have the lifting up and the clouds. Fairly soon [at Pentecost], the house will be filled, the house where the disciples are is being filled, as part of the Lord's train now comes down upon amongst them. In fact at the beginning of [Acts], we have the, if you like, living out on earth of Isaiah's throne vision.

"We get the throne vision in Daniel as well and all of this is important to understand what's going on in the ascension, rather than it being a matter of how Jesus physically departed, i.e. vertically, which is actually stressed by the angels [in Acts 1:11] was not really how he departed. It's a question of what was meant by the rite of the Ascension. In the background to this there is the understanding, the ancient Jewish understanding from the time of the first Temple, [of] the key liturgy: atonement and enthronement. The great High Priest giving himself and then the royal figure being enthroned and God's power being over all.

"These two central feasts, they had already happened in heaven. They were part of the Creator's plan that already happened in heaven, they already existed, if you like, as real facts. And in this secondary reality - which we call the world, earth, creation - they hadn't yet been actually fully enacted. They could only be enacted liturgically by signs in the temple, but the prophets awaited the time when they would actually be lived out. And Jesus's life, death, resurrection and ascension is the living out on earth of that which is done in heaven. That's the whole purpose of it, that's what's meant by the incarnation - the making available in flesh, living out on earth, that which is already done in heaven. And the Ascension is the conclusion of that. It's, if you like, the earthly glimpse of the end of the whole thing. And it's only an earthly glimpse because we have no possible language to describe the end of the heavenly liturgy.

"We see different moments. We see Jesus's teaching. We see him going to his death, we see him living into death so as to detoxify it. We see his resurrection in which the beginning of everything opens up and we suddenly see the whole wonder of creation being made alive for us and us being invited to take part in it. And then, very very quickly, the Ascension, the enthronement in heaven. We use simply a mystical language for that, because how do we talk about the conclusion to the whole thing? How do we talk about the whole thing having been finally enacted, so the full power that God had intended to unleash on earth has now been unleashed and we can now await for the whole of that presence to make itself available to us in the form of the Holy Spirit?

"That's the key distinction that's going on here. Jesus finished something, he achieved something, it's done, it's over. And now that he's achieved it, something massive is going to be made available to us, something huge is going to be unleashed in our midst. The hugeness that has already been achieved in heaven is now going to be made available to us in the form of power, gifts and so forth...

"So that very much more than the vertical lift-off is what's going on here. And just to remind us about that, even at the time in [Acts], Luke is aware of the risk of vertical thinking. So he says, “they were still staring in the sky when suddenly two men in white were standing near them.” So here we have the two seraphs from the Holy place. The Holy place has now gone out into the world. The two seraphs are standing near them, they're standing beside them- not up in heaven, they're standing beside them on earth - saying, “Why are you, men from Galilee, standing here looking into the sky?” That's distinct from heaven. Heaven is, in principle, anywhere and everywhere. The sky is physically upwards. “Jesus, who has being taken up from you into heaven,” - not the same as the sky - “this same Jesus will come back in the same way as you have seen him go.” How did they see him go? They saw him go between two different sorts of seraphs, thieves, one of whom was penitent, on either side of him, as he gave himself for them, promising that that day the penitent thief would be in paradise. So the opening up of the creation, the opening up of the garden would be happening that day. That's how you saw him go, that's how you will see him come back - in the opening up of the new creation by the One handing himself over.

"So, the feast of the Ascension is celebrating completion. The fullness of everything that God had intended for us on earth has finally been achieved for us. We are now going to be enabled to receive this power and take it up ourselves and become its full participants and its 'acters-out'. It's like Jesus is being enthroned in heaven, which means, finally, if you like, that human nature which was always meant in Adam to have been given a heavenly status, has finally been given that heavenly status. It's finally been resolved - the problem of Adam having fallen into futility. Now Adam has been taken to the heavenly place, and with him, that's with Jesus, all of us, potentially starting now, beginning to be able to live out the heavenly vision.

"Hence the importance of us being asked to keep our minds, fix our minds, on the things that are above, allowing our minds to be transfixed by that which is coming upon us, by that which is opening out and coming upon us, rather than that which is worrying us, tempting us to fear, depression, and panic. Rather, allowing ourselves to be filled with the thought of how much is being given to us, and that the Giver is constantly looking for new things to give us in order to fulfil that which has already been achieved.

"So this is, if you like, the something victorious about the Ascension - victorious not only for what Jesus was intending, what God had intended, not only for creation, but for us. This is the beginning of our victory, if you like, and that's why this is a great great feast."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Ascension Sunday, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7bisCHfBXY)

[Note that the celebration of the Ascension is traditionally on the Thursday before the seventh Sunday of Easter. For analysis and discussion of the lectionary texts for Easter 7B, see https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/easter7b/]

From the Lectionary for 5 May 2024 (Easter 6B)

John 15:9-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

~

"I hope you can see that there would be a glitch in this passage if we were to assume the moralistic “authority gives instruction” mode of teaching. Because in that mode, Jesus has friends, and lays down his life for them, and then commands them, who are already his friends, to do the same to others.

"However, that’s not what the passage says! The passage presupposes that those for whom he gives his life are not yet his friends. On the contrary, he is opening up the possibility for them to become his friends by his doing something for them, on the inside of which they will then be able to find themselves as multipliers of exactly what he has done, which is how they will become his equals, his friends. They will become people who are going to be empowered to give themselves away, freely acting out of being insiders in something that has been opened up for them by someone who loved them.

"In other words, the gift of creating this possibility for his friends, and the commandment to create it are the same thing. There is no moralism here! There would be moralism if something were done, and as a result of it something were then commanded. That could indeed be a sort of emotional blackmail: “Look at me, I’ve done something for you, gone to so much trouble and suffering for you - now at least show that I have purchase on your heartstrings: do what I say.”

"Instead of that, what we have is a personal invitation, so that each one of the disciples, which is each one of us, finds him- or herself being taken out of the realm of blind commandments into that sharing in equality of spirit which is friendship. [...]

"Servants are told to do something, and if they don’t understand why they should do it, they’re told “You don’t need to understand why, just do it, you’re a servant. I, the Master, know why I want it done, and your ways are not my ways.” Morals are often taught in this way!

"Friends, however, are chosen freely, and become trusted insiders on a level of equality with each other. They are not given compartmentalized tasks, but are entrusted with being imaginative, creative sharers in the whole project. As they share in a project, discovering for themselves the open-ended parameters which have been made available by the One who gave himself, so they will find that they are not only friends of the one who inaugurated the project, but brothers, heirs, the ultimate insiders, fully adopted into the life of the Son.

"Jesus makes it possible for us to share his desire at the level of equality, which is that of friendship. So we are enabled to desire as Jesus desires, according to the Father. Given that, it makes perfect sense to ask the Father for whatever we want, as if we were the Son, because we will in fact be becoming the Son, the ultimate insider in the life of God."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 553-55 (from Essay 12, “Neighbors and Insiders: What’s It Like to Dwell in a Non-moralistic Commandment?”)

~

"[The] extraordinary privilege of finding yourself chosen to be a friend by Jesus... that's what this is about, sitting in the sense of: this [has] all been set up by someone else, this is all for us, this is not a task, this is not a duty, this is much more like an invitation [from] someone who's actually chosen us, who thinks we're worth something, who wants us to bear fruit.

"And it says, “and I appointed you to go and bear fruit” [v 16].  This word “appointed” - strangely it's the same word [Greek: tithemi] as “laying down” one's life. It's “to place” ... “No one has greater love than 'to place' one's life for his friends” [v 13]. “And I 'placed' you to go and bear fruit” [v 16].

"I think there's a very delicate sense here which... becomes rather official with the word “appointed.”  [Instead I think the sense is,] “I've placed you, I've put you in the place where you will be able to go and bear fruit.”  In other words, not only have I chosen you as a friend, but I've placed you, you're going to be in the right place.  You'll be pruned (and how), but there is a place for you and that place will enable you, sharing in the joy, to be able to achieve and fulfill all the things that my Father has planned for you.

"“I appointed you to go and bear fruit, placed you to bear fruit, fruit that will last so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.”  And here he goes back to the sense of the vine, that he is the one in whose name, in whose person, we are going to be able to desire and want and be fulfilled.

"“I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”  Remember that the command is, before it's an instruction, it's the gift, it's the illustration, it's the whole life [of Jesus] that is being lived out of love, knowingly and joyfully knowing that he was loved, so that we can get on the inside of that, reproduce it for others, and find ourselves on the inside of the life of God."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwtQK-qa2xs)

[Source of James Alison quote from "Jesus the Forgiving Victim" and for discussion of all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/easter6b/]