From the Lectionary for 25 January 2026 (Epiphany 3A)

Matthew 4:12-25 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
    on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
    have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
    light has dawned.”

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishers. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted with paralysis, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.

~

"So it's a very interesting beginning, the universality of the mission does seem to start very early on in Matthew's Gospel, and we'll see how that works itself out over time as we as we get on. But anyhow, here at the very beginning [...] of his ministry Jesus is kind of marking his territory. Once John is arrested he moves into place and starts. And he starts by saying the same thing as John: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

"And then he already begins to create the sign of the Kingdom that is coming and in the face of which, therefore, people are going to be able to repent. Because, of course, it's always God showing God's self first that enables repentance, rather than a moral instruction followed by something nice. The indicative always comes before the imperative in practice, even though in rhetoric sometimes it's the other way around. That's central to Matthew, as it is to all the Gospels and to any understanding of grace. A powerful beginning, with Matthew setting up quite clearly how he is going to be tackling these things from now on: first teaching and then signs."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mao7mtdLLQ)

~

"In Mt. 4:17, Jesus says:  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repenting does not mean to make a laundry list of our little sins and try to stop doing them. Repenting means to turn around, to switch our minds and our hearts, to see life in a new way. This is the fundamental thrust of the Kingdom. But what specs can we get from the blueprint?

[...]

"What does the Kingdom of God, founded on the foolishness of the cross look like? The blueprint we have in these readings doesn’t look like much, but then a crucified criminal in Roman times doesn’t look like much either. When we read just a bit further in Matthew, we enter the real-life rooms of the Kingdom outlined in the blueprint. We find many rooms, many mansions, all of which offer contagious possibilities such as being blessed for being poor or for being a peacemaker, or turning the other cheek or walking the extra mile, and then finding in these weaknesses the rock that supports the house of faith we are building against the storm of Rome and Assyria and the power brokers of our time."

- Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory’s Abbey (Three Rivers, MI), from blog post titled “Blueprint of the Kingdom.” (http://andrewmarrosb.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/blueprint-of-the-kingdom/)

~

"Repentance is about where we place our bodies…and where we place our bodies is always close to Jesus. And Jesus' body is always close to the vulnerable, the oppressed, those in anguish. Matthew's story about Jesus and the Kindom of God, about repentance and transformation, is about where we place our bodies. “Immediately, they left.” [v.22] Their leaving is a bodied movement. It's a change in the location of their bodies. It's a change in their focus and attention. It's a physical, visible change in the placement of their bodies and lives.

"And it is also a spiritual and internal change and transformation. The verb translated “they left” is the same Greek verb we encountered two weeks ago: aphemi. To let go, to release, to forgive. Jesus, the light shining in the darkness, is inviting us to keep our bodies close to his body. But more than just our bodies, in order for the light to shine in the darkness, we let God's Spirit breathe our repentance.

"The Spirit of God is the life and breath of our transformation. It is the Breath of God breathing in us that makes it possible to live letting go, releasing, forgiving. We listen and watch Jesus with Andrew and Peter and James and John. And everywhere they went, Light shone on those where were in anguish. And there was no gloom. The Light of the world, the Light of Christ, was being embodied.

[...]

"There is darkness. There is anguish. And we may we be foolish enough to trust the Light of the world. May we be foolish enough to follow the Light. May we be foolish enough to embody the Light... in all places... with all bodies."

- Suella Gerber, from sermon delivered on 22 Jan, 2017 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gerber-012217-sermon.pdf)

[Source of links to Andrew Marr blog post and Suella Gerber sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/epiphany3a/]

From the Lectionary for 18 January 2026 (Epiphany 2A)

John 1:29-34 (NRSV Updated Edition)

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Chosen One[a].”

[a] Other ancient authorities read “the Son of God”

~

"'Lamb of God' is a sacrificial term but when applied to Jesus its sacrificial meaning is radically changed. No longer does it mean that the lamb bears the death God inflicts on sinners as punishment, instead of us sinners who actually deserve it. It is not sacrifice as substitution, him instead of me, but sacrifice as self-giving, all I have and am for you, O God. Sacrifice as utter self-giving, that is the true meaning of sacrifice as defined by Jesus through his death.

"And the notion of 'sin bearing' then has the force not of bearing a load of divine anger but rather of suffering the sharp points of our human violence against each other and thus against the God in whose image we are [...] [O]n the Cross the Lamb of God absorbs into himself all the force of our rivalry and hatred, all our mutual cruelty and contempt. That ability to “draw all men unto myself,” (John 12:32: “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself”), means not that he draws them as saints but as sinners, as violent competitors, who in the Cross may see what wrath they inflict on God and what love God renders in return.

"So this Lamb of God is not the sacrifice we bring to God but the sacrifice God brings to us! This is God's Lamb offered to us not our Lamb offered to God, instead of us. This is the sign and the substance of the fact that God gives and gives, to us who take and take, from him and from each other. This is a new covenant, that is a new way of being together, as givers, as imitators of the generous God whom Jesus described in his parabolic teaching and acted out dramatically in his life."

- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from a sermon on January 20, 2008 (source no longer available online)

~

"Let's look at this little phrase, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Please notice one thing which seems to me is very important and which time and time again people misquote. People say “Here's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Umm no, it says the *sin* of the world. It seems to be referring not so much to a collection of bad things as to the whole sphere of [...] a failing creation, that which other parts of the Hebrew scriptures refer to as vanity, the sense of everything grinding down. And indeed the whole purpose of the great Atonement Feast was to bring creation back to its fullness again, precisely taking away the vanity, the failed-ness, the pointing-towards-nothing of things.

"[John the Baptist is] talking, not about someone who's come here to pay a price for things, to tick off, but someone who's come to actually create what I would call an anthropological revolution, the possibility of the New Creation in which everything is able to flow back upwards towards God rather than being ground down into pointlessness, senselessness, going-nowhere-ness, not-being, creation somehow having not having lived up to the value of the glory of God which is what it was made to reflect.

"Anyway, an extremely rich phrase, “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And it does seem to be referring to the Atonement Lamb, because the Passover Lamb was not sin-related. The part of the Passover Lamb was to redeem the sons, the firstborns of Israel. [...] In John's gospel the Atonement Lamb and the Passover Lamb are brought together, but here it's very much the Atonement Lamb that's being mentioned.

[...]

"And then he ends, “And I myself have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.” John's witness was what John was all about, preparing and being able to say, “This is the one, this is God's son.” The Son, the one who is going to perform the sacrifice not only with the water but the water and the blood - that's a phrase which we'll get later in John's gospel. In other words, here was the one who was going to do the two things: fulfill Exodus and the atonement, the water and the blood, the baptism and the sacrifice. Only the Son, the Davidic heir, the great High Priest, the One who is going to be able to renew creation from within, only he was to be able to do that."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Second Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G9xgCLsPDo)

[For further analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/epiphany2a/]

From the Lectionary for 11 January 2026 (Epiphany 1A - Baptism of Jesus)

Isaiah 42:1 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
    my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
    he will bring forth justice to the nations.

Matthew 3:13-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

~

"As he was baptized, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended, and a voice from heaven said: “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”

"This proclamation refers to two key verses in the Hebrew Bible that tell us what baptism is all about. In Psalm 2, the king, the Messiah is singled out from the raging nations that are rising up against the Lord and his anointed. The inundation of baptism draws Jesus out of the inundation of the nations raging against one another. In Jesus, we too are drawn out of this inundation and so freed from raging against everybody else.

"But we are not freed from being the target of raging nations when they unite against the one who has been freed from their wrath. These baptismal words spoken to Jesus also refer to Isaiah 42:1, the first line of the first song of the Servant of Yahweh. Throughout these songs, the Servant has been called out of a violent society to become instead the victim of that society's violence.

"Unlike the Psalmist who threatens the raging nations with a rod of iron, (Ps. 2:9) the Servant does not retaliate in any way against the violence inflicted on him. In baptism, we too are overwhelmed by the Servant's suffering, but then we are also overwhelmed by God's vindication of the Servant."

- Andrew Marr, Moving and Resting in God's Desire, pp. 189-90

~

"Now “all righteousness” means the whole of the prophets and the law. Remember in Matthew it's “the prophets and the law,” rather than “the law and the prophets” - Matthew understands that the law itself is prophetic, it's pointing towards a prophetic fulfillment, which is why Jesus is the prophetic fulfillment. And so here, “all righteousness” - that of the law and that of the prophets.

"And the fulfilling all righteousness is going to include Jesus occupying the space, the place, of death. Why? Because only thus can the Holy Spirit be given. Remember that in the Torah, the whole point of the Holy Place in the Temple is that it is kept from death, nothing to do with death can ever be in it. God is, as it were, allergic to death - quite rightly, God is the Ever-living One, the Almighty One. But the notion of God's deathlessness is seen as something that it needs protecting against by us, it's in rivalry with our lives. But Jesus has come here so as to occupy the place of death, as the opposite, [...] which is what's going to enable the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life, to be given to us, so that we can begin to live as if death were not.

"And that is how, thanks to Jesus fulfilling the law, by going through even what the law prescribes - the death - that he is going to be able to fulfill all righteousness. So [...] what Jesus is going to do [...] is to actually perform the definitive final sacrifice, whereby God as Son comes in and offers himself a sacrifice to us, occupying the space of death so that we may be set free from it forever. [...]

"[W]hen Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water - and the word “coming up” is the standard word referring to ordination of priests at the time, and the understanding is that once you had been baptized or washed as a priest you had been through death so now you were able to stand in the Holy Place, and the Holy Place was understood to be the place of abundant life, God's effervescent life [...] - but here, the “coming up” is the coming up of the great High Priest - “Suddenly the heavens were opened to him,” meaning exactly that. As he was ordained he was automatically in the Holy Place, the Holy Place was opened to him. In other words, it had started to come about on Earth, that which had been before the foundation of the world was now being made available on Earth.

"“And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.” So, in the New Testament we move gradually backwards to the beginning of Creation, not only all the prophetic uses of water, but now back to Noah who, when the whole world was being destroyed by God's wrath in Genesis, sent out the bird. The first time it came back, the second time it didn't come back because it had settled. So here the Spirit of God settling on him like a bird.

"But even more than that, the Spirit of God  - he doesn't say the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of God like a dove was the spirit that hovered over the waters [at] the beginning of Genesis [...] this is the bird, the Spirit, that hovered over the waters before Creation which is alighting on him. In other words, at last the Creator has come amongst us as human and is going to fulfill Creation in going to his death as great High Priest, so as to open up for us the possibility of entering into the fullness of creation. All of that is foreseen here.

"And the voice from Heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” [...] In other words, this was done for other people to hear. Jesus is doing something deliberately for us, to make clear the sense of what he's going to do. [...] It's also a reference to [...] God's way of referring to Isaac as Abraham's beloved son, because the same word which is translated as “only begotten” in Hebrew is often translated [also] as beloved. So here is God's promise that God will fulfill: God will provide the sacrifice. God is not going to sacrifice - that's something we do - but God's going to provide so as to undo our sacrificial world from within by undoing death.

"“With whom I am well pleased.” In other words, this is part of [...] not only looking at things and seeing that it's good, but being well pleased. This is the fullness of humanity coming into being, to open up Creation and the Kingdom of Heaven for us.

"So we get this wonderful rich scene in St. Matthew's gospel of the Creator coming in as human to occupy death and open up creation, something that John the Baptist had understood was more powerful than he, but not in a comparative sense - something way beyond what he could have imagined. And something entirely without vengeance or violence, which is going to be for so many people the great stumbling block."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Baptism of the Lord, Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JRCb70Nrwg)

~

"The crucial center of God's justice is the nonviolent power of love. It is the power which saves humankind and creation from human violence. Until everything is centered on the nonviolence of God, our messaging of the Gospel of New Creation will fall short of the mark of faithfulness to God. Jesus the Messiah is the one who can bring us into that full and true faithfulness.

"Being baptized into the historical events of the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, is having one's humanity made new in identity with the project of New Creation that these events launch. Circling back: at the center of faithfulness to this project is faith in the nonviolent God and the divine nonviolent power of love."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from "Opening Comments: Preaching the Gospel of New Creation" on the lectionary page for Epiphany 1A (link in 1st comment below)

[Source of Andrew Marr and Paul Nuechterlein quotes, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/epiphany1a/]

From the Lectionary for 4 January 2026 (Christmas 2ABC)

John 1:1-18 (NRSV)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

~

"It is difficult to capture the linguistic connotations of the term ‘logos’ in John 1. Scholars have long debated its background [...] It is a term used in Greek philosophy to refer to ‘the structuring principle of reality.’

[...]

"As the ‘structuring principle of reality’ it is more than ‘speech’, more than ‘power’, more than ‘thought’, more than ‘act’. It is all of the above and more. Friedrich Nietzsche, that great critic of Christianity proposed that the ‘Logos’ is ‘Nonsense’. I want to suggest that this is an insight worth pursuing. For what happens to this Logos is two fold nonsense: this Logos is rejected (1:11) and ‘becomes flesh’.

"Why is this logos rejected? Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher had identified that which structured reality as ‘polemos’ (violence or war). This is an insight about the way we humans structure reality long before [Rene] Girard discovered the power of violence to shape the way we do this thing called humanity, culture, history and religion. Violence is that which structures our reality!

"The nonviolent Logos, Jesus Christ, the Logos who structures reality in forgiveness will never make sense to a reality structured on violence. This is why so many people, especially Christians, cannot make sense of a nonviolent Jesus or a nonviolent God. We have made God into our own image, rivalrous, violent and retributive. A God who freely forgives apart from sacrifice, apart from blood, is a god who does not fit into this world's (kosmos) way of thinking, therefore this kind of a God is sheer nonsense."

- Michael Hardin (from FB post)

~

"[T]he notion that [creation is] something good is because the One who is bringing it into being allows hints to those of us who are on the inside of what the Creator is really all about, the creation created through wisdom [...] [T]he principle of wisdom is precisely that it's making a live creation, holding it all together in such a way that it shows off of itself the glory of God. It gives off, points up to, gives away the glory of God. If you like, that creation, the wisdom, comes into our midst to open our eyes, to make it possible to be on the inside and actually see something clearly for what it is.

"And in the back of this, [...] part of the deep sense of this is that everything that is, there's a rationale to it, there's a logic to it. Reality is not simply a chaotic and random series of events and things. This is what the creation means, that there is a there's a rationale, an inner structure of reality which, when it's brought alive and we're unable to share with it, opens us up to what's going on, the possibility of us being participants and insiders in this, in creation. The world creation means God's rational dynamic product which is functional, which is for something, and inside which we are and can grow.

"So when we [...] get to St John's Gospel, we have these extraordinary phrases: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” So for “Word” - an act of communication - understand the logical structure, the structure of reality. That's what is coming into the world, the logical structural reality is actually going to enter into creation, to open us up actually to be able to come to life, to become fully alive in creation, to become sons and daughters of God.

"So this baby who is born is not just a baby, he's the beginning of the manifestation in our midst of the dynamic structuring reality of everything that is. If you like, the plan, the form of communication, all of that is being made alive so that it speaks to us and so that if we accept it we can be included in it, so that we can actually become Children of God. [...] We actually get to be the heirs of creation, creation fully alive its entire dynamic, fully revealed. We get to be participants in it.

"In other words - this is something which is less fashionable than it should be in Christian circles - is that Jesus is actually bringing about the reality of what is. That's part of what this birth is, it's the beginning of it becoming available and clear to us, the reality of what is. And as John says, the reality turns out to be  something much, much better than had been hoped for.

[...]

"What's being brought out is how the one came in, making it possible for people to receive him and therefore to become children of God, which meant that he became available as a sacrifice of forgiveness. Those who were able to receive this actually found that forgiveness turns out to be the structuring dynamic. There's not as it were a law and then something to be forgiven. There is the structuring dynamic of everything that is, that is in fact opened out by forgiveness. It is this that we're invited to participate in.

"[The author of the 4th Gospel] is saying here that this is the one that's coming in, this is the one that John the Baptist pointed to. What we're seeing here is not merely a baby, it's the baby who is going to grow into a man, we are going to be able to see him and he is going to become the way, the structuring principle of reality opens us up to it and to being participants in it. This is the greatest thing that could possibly ever have happened [...]

"[The author says], ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.’ This was the Lord, understood to be the begotten, not created, Son of God, who had come into our midst, thanks to the Virgin who became the Holy Place. That was how the ‘shekinah’, the Most High, tabernacled in our midst. And this is how the whole fullness of God became revealed to us, shown to us, but not, if you like, simply something for us to see, but for us to become participants in the making finally alive and full of creation.

"So this is if you like the richness of the Christmas story, the fullness of the invitation that's going on here, and the source of endless joy and the opening up of our imaginations."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for The Second Sunday of Christmas" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upVCydSEUcE)

[For further analysis and discussion on this week's lectionary text: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/xmas2abc/]

From the Lectionary for 28 December 2025 (Christmas 1A)

Matthew 2:13-23 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
    wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
    she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazarene.”

Hebrews 2:17-18 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.

~

"In Matthew, Jesus is the new and more powerful non-violent Moses. Moses' birth was also contested and empire his enemy. At the time of Moses' birth the Hebrew women were to abandon their male babies lest the birth of more little boys, who could grow into warriors, threaten the king. [...] In Matthew the new Moses miraculously escapes death at the hands of empire by going to Egypt. Being in Egypt, he is set to come out of Egypt and save all people just like Moses saved the Hebrews. [...]

"After King Herod died, an angel from the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. “Get up,” the angel said, and “take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. Those who were trying to kill the child are dead.” I love the phrase “get up”; take action, get a move on, get going, it's time to go forward in a new way. These are significant times! Do you believe that? The New Year has arrived, the Christmas break is over. It's time to move back to Israel and reclaim the journey toward wholeness there. The gospel of the non-violent Jesus has been hidden in Egypt and it's time for it to return to its homeland.

[...]

"We end with Joseph and the Holy Family beginning anew in Nazareth. We too are beginning anew; a new year [...] And like Joseph and his family, we are not alone. We journey forth with each other and with the Spirit from God telling us we are non-violently loved and that we can nonviolently love wherever we are. We know we are part of the biggest movement in history that, in the end, will show love as the driver and maintainer of the whole universe."

- Tom Truby, from a sermon delivered on January 1, 2017 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Truby-Christmas1-2017-Get-Up-and-Embrace-the-Future-Unafraid.pdf)

~

"[T]he Bible's sense of Christmas is well-anchored in our human reality of pain and suffering, so that it can truly bring us Good News. Our second lesson from Hebrews is a good example. [...] Jesus came into the flesh, not to gloss over reality with fantasy, not even the fantasy world of holiday cheer, but to share in the very things that make up our realities. It says that “he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might pioneer for us a perfect way of salvation through the sufferings of our human reality.” Not around them, or over them. But through them. That's the Good News for us this morning, even in the face of our normal, non-holiday reality. The Good News is that God helps us to face that reality. We don't have to try to run away or escape it.

"No, the gospel stories of Jesus' birth never wander far from that reality. In this age, our culture has built up whole fantasy world stories to surround Christmas, but that's not what the gospel stories of Jesus' birth are like. Luke's story of Christmas is the most pastoral and peaceful. Yet even there the cold reality is that there was no room for Mary and Joseph under a roof, so Jesus was born in a barn. And as Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus for his naming, the prophet Simeon tells them, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed - and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:34-35)

[...]

"Matthew expresses the theme of rejection directly with a story. Three traveling magi welcomed the prospect of a new king, but local King Herod didn't think much of it. He responded with the kind of violence we'd rather not think about, the kind of violence we'd like to forget with our holiday cheer. Jesus is saved at this point of Matthew's story. But for what? We know the ending: eventually the powers and authorities will get their wish and kill Jesus. At the beginning of Matthew's story, it is not yet time.

"But the troubling part is that, in the meantime, scores of other little children are slaughtered by Herod. Isn't that the same kind of reality we go back to this week, the kind of world we live in? We celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace at Christmas, but this week we return to a world of terrible violence, where innocent children suffer and are killed everyday. This is the point of the sermon were I am tempted to find a nice story that will help us to feel better and to make things alright. But there isn't such nice stories, are there? I may search all my sermon resources, and I don't think I'm going to find such a story. I search my own personal story, and I know so. Because I know too many people who suffered terribly as children, who were abused and neglected. And there aren't any nice stories that magically make it alright. There isn't enough holiday cheer to cover over the reality.

"No, there is only one story I know that can begin to make things alright. It is this story of a baby born in a barn, who escaped death at the hands of the authorities as a child, but who did not do so as an adult. No, he knowingly went to his death for me and for you. And it is only the fact that God raised him up from death, that I can begin to have any hope at all. Because that resurrection is the promise that God does ultimately save us from this world of suffering and pain. God does ultimately rescue us from the hands of those who would do us harm.

"I say that it only begins to make things better, because two thousand years later, there are children still being sacrificed to madmen the likes of Herod. But this is because God has chosen a whole new way of living to win us salvation. This new way does not run away from the violence but faces it. Neither does God resort to the old way of doing things, which is to fight force with force. God will not stop the madness by getting caught up in the same madness. No, God gives us a totally new way to live. God neither runs away from the madness, nor gets caught up in it, but stands there in the face of it and continues to love. Love. Instead God came into the midst of the madness, and through a suffering love has begun to pioneer a new way for us. Jesus was the pioneer of that perfect way.

"Why is there still violence? Because love refuses to violently snuff it out. Love only knows love. With this new option, one that will someday end the madness, there may even be more violence for a time. Matthew's story of Herod makes that clear. When those who stand for the old way of doing things like Herod, when they are confronted with this new possibility, they strike out with all that they can muster. But Christ-like love is the power of love that can stand tall in the face of it. And we who are called as disciples are called to follow in this new way of love. Perhaps the best news is that God, in becoming a human being, took on our human nature and has begun to transform it, baptize it, so that we are able to follow in the way of Christ.

"Let's close today with that last line of our second lesson: “Because Jesus himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” (Hebrews 2:18) Did you get that? Because Jesus fought off the temptation to do things the old way, to use force to fight force and violence and inflict pain on others, because he won out over that temptation, he is able to help us to do so, too. That is the Good News this morning. That you and I, in knowing that story of Jesus, and in the Holy Spirit of that same Jesus, that you and I can beat that temptation, too. We can become new creatures with a new way of life. We can begin to make a difference in this world.

"As we face a New Year, we do so again with the promise that we daily can become new creatures in Christ. The only resolution we need make this New Year is to truly be his disciples. For his is the way that goes through reality, the reality of suffering. Not around it, or over it, but through it. That's the Good News for us this morning as we head back to our post-holiday realities."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from sermon delivered on December 30-31, 1995 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/xmas1a_ser_1995/)

[Source of links to Tom Truby and Paul Nuechterlein sermons, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/xmas1a/]

From the Lectionary for 25 December 2025 (Christmas Day, Year A)

Isaiah 9:2 (NRSV Updated Edition)

The people who walked in darkness
    have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
    on them light has shined.

John 1:1-18 (NRSV Updated Edition)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

~

"The beginning of John's Gospel, even though in one sense it seems the furthest removed from what we're used to at Nativity, which is focusing down on the very practical issues of baby, manger, beasts, swaddling clothes, stars, shepherds - all those very particular human and animal things which attend a birth - and what we get in John's Gospel, if you like, seems so extra-planetary that we pass it off with something like dismay. [...] These 18 verses are some of the most remarkable words ever to have been written in any human language, it would be foolish to try and expatiate too wildly on them. What I would like to do is to say how much closer I think they are to more concrete, more human, more historical sense of a little baby in precarious situation in Bethlehem then perhaps we might give credit for.

[...]

"The beginning was the Criterion, was the Word, the beginning for us of creation. [...] In creation, you remember the Genesis narrative,  “And God said.” The creative Word, the Word that creates. So the Word was at the very beginning of all things, [the] Word was with God, and the Word was God. [It's saying] the creative thing is not simply an extra thing that God happens to do, it is God's criteria for God. We are actually learning something about who God is, when God makes God's Criterion available to us, in, and as, and through creation.

"We pair that off with the very end [of the passage], [...] “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” So the Criterion that was with God, and the Criterion was God, was in the beginning with God. So it turns out that the Criterion for everything being is a Son. That's in a sense the most extraordinary claim that's for us to understand and from which to get a glimpse of what's going on in the Christmas story. [...] [T]he criteria for bringing everything into being is that of a father's love for a son. The underpinning reality of everything that is, is this sort of affection. The very structure of reality is made available to us through this sort of love.

[...]

"“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” Here's the suggestion that the very structuring force of reality, which is a loving structure, finally came into our midst as something that can enlighten us, light us up from within - was the light, was the source of our seeing - has come in and for those who receive him who believe in his name I believe that his name is the same as of the name he gives power to become children of God. [...] He's talking about people being brought into being so that we may actually participate on the inside of creation and discover what really is [...]

"The way that this was made available to us started - of course John doesn't say this, we only get this in Matthew and Luke - started with the bizarre, the bizarrely powerless-seeming sign of the babe born in Bethlehem. This was a wholly, fully human sign. It's us learning to detect the love of the only begotten son.

[...]

"With grace and truth, and through Jesus Christ, the sense of the tenderness and 'not out to get us' - the friendly quality, the backdrop to everything that there is, that this is a friendly gentle adventure - strangely it's that, if you like, the background colours to the Nativity picture, that are some of the most difficult things to get, the background colours which are of the whole of creation actually being vastly more friendly to us if only we could learn to find our way into being sons and daughters of God, those who are actually on the inside of creation. [...]

"So as you come to Christmas celebration this year, think not only of the 3D figures in the creche, what they say about God's power being shown forth in being disposed to be absolutely weak, in the middle of precarious situation, in the middle of people who are going to make his life difficult and ultimately kill him; but also the vast backdrop of the sheer friendliness of creation, that which we're becoming used to learning about and seeing ourselves as sons and daughters. This is, if you're like, not a moral thing but us being shown who God really is.

"He said, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” Everything that we learn about God is going to be learned through following the human life of Jesus, and it's going to show us that there is an extraordinary power in weakness, an extraordinary joy in our discovering our likeness with apparent others, and that all these actually tend to show a vastly richer project, adventure - a friendly adventure - which is creation. And that this is the constant backdrop to everything that is. Curiously it's the difficulty of receiving and living from that backdrop which is one of the real challenges of our lives and one of the real joys of Christmas."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for The Solemnity of the Nativity 2022 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jx9ElzPlWo)

~

"Christmas is the gift that keeps on giving. The Word made flesh in Jesus Christ comes to be born in all people - through the Gospel of grace and truth - the gift of a common identity in a divided world - the gift of peace. This is the present we receive today. This is the gift that we receive in order to give away all year long - the Word made flesh - Jesus Christ - God’s peace to us."

- David Froemming, from sermon, “Christmas: God’s Peace.” (http://www.christlutheranlancaster.com/site/file.asp?sec_id=180019502&file_id=180425357&cpage=180096537&table=file_downloads)

~

"Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe"

- Bruce Cockburn, from song "Cry of a Tiny Babe"

[Source of link to David Froemming sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/xmas/]

From the Lectionary for 21 December 2025 (Advent 4A)

Matthew 1:18-25 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

“Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son,
    and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.

~

"We are on the very brink of the Nativity. Our sense of the power of the One Coming in has been stretched, challenged, recast over the last three weeks. And now the reality of that power begins to dawn more clearly. And what is astonishing about it, is that unlike any power we know, this power is confident enough to be vulnerable. And that means confident enough in us to be vulnerable to us.

[...]

"[In Isaiah 7:10-16] Isaiah gives [King Ahaz] a sign [...] There is nothing outlandish about it. It doesn't appear to come from Heaven, nor to emerge from Sheol. It is quiet, gentle, ordinary-seeming. A maiden is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel. It would appear, at first glance to be totally natural, totally from this, human side of things, rather than emerging from something special, divine and portentous. Thus it seems not really to be a sign at all. And yet, it is in this sign of quietude, and confidence that God will reveal himself as the one who loves his people, and who will bring his kingdom to flourishing. It is the sort of sign which is not able to be perceived by those whose attention is fixed on current affairs, on power politics and on strategic calculations.

"Matthew has seen this in his Gospel. He has seen that Isaiah's promise of a sign relating to a kingdom flows into the much fuller sign which is happening now, quietly, and offstage. The fulness of the power pointed to by Isaiah was revealing itself in a gentleness made available under the most delicate of circumstances. For the maiden chosen to bear the son was not living in any well-protected enclave. On the contrary, the first thing which the power dared to do was to make itself visible as a provocation, inviting the maiden who was found to be with child to share the opprobrium of being a single mother in a society where such things might easily lead to death. She was to depend for her reputation, and maybe for her life, on the good will of an untested male who knew that he was not the father of the child.

"What sort of power is it that allows itself to be so vulnerable? It is prepared to trust itself to one of the most notoriously unreliable features of human existence. Not merely the pain and riskiness of human gestation and childbirth. But also the whole of human skittishness around male honour, and the potential for violence which goes with female dependency.

"Beyond even this, as Matthew makes clear, this power is prepared to allow itself to be vulnerable to that most dangerous of constructs: the Law. For Joseph was a righteous man, and as such would know well what Deuteronomy 22 prescribed for cases like this: death by stoning. That Joseph's righteousness already consisted in his being inclined to interpret that law in the most gentle way possible, seeking to obey it by “putting her away quietly” was not something automatic.

"Joseph decides to apply the law in this way, already a fragile act of interpretation, and one which it might not be at all easy to carry out in practice, since “secrets will out”. This decision was made just prior to the Lord inviting Joseph to consider another possible interpretation: that Mary's pregnancy was not in any way something which fell foul of the Law, coming instead from the Holy Spirit. Joseph is given a dream, and in the light of that he is invited to make an interpretation with enormous practical consequences.

"Again: quite how extraordinary is the power that is gentle and confident enough to be able to enter into the practical consequences of a human act of interpretation? For there is no sign that is not also a human act of interpretation. And there can be no riskier way than this to enter into the realm of signs. This pregnant woman is either an adulteress or a virgin blessed by God. What power is it that is prepared to trust that a human will choose the latter, infinitely less plausible interpretation, and then be so gracious as to cover over the vulnerability of his bride to be and allow the sign to flourish?

"It is little wonder that Paul in Galatians emphasizes that Jesus was born under the Law, for Jesus' vulnerability to the Law is the sign of the power of the one who was to fulfil the whole purpose of the Law. This is all about power, as is made magnificently clear in the Introduction to Romans. The fulfilment of all God's promises would come through someone who was of the now failed and insignificant line of David. This one would be declared, or ordained the High Priest of God, God's Son, YHWH himself, bearing the Name by his passing through death in the spirit of holiness.

"Vulnerability to mere flesh; vulnerability to the Law; vulnerability to death: these will be the signs of the power of the One coming in, of his confidence in us, in what we can become, and in what he can make of us."

- James Alison, from facebook post on 18 Dec 2019 (https://www.facebook.com/JesustheForgivingVictim/posts/pfbid0yXSqGzq5YesYmeF4hEnFxCazGVKXoVfAkYknrRAqWvHYBhSXpUwJmDzYJ2GRqqi2l)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/advent4a/]

[I also highly recommend James Alison's video "Homily for Fourth Sunday in Advent 2022 A" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whq4HhUxFhA]

From the Lectionary for 14 December 2025 (Advent 3A)

Matthew 11:2-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What, then, did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What, then, did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
    who will prepare your way before you.’

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

~

"With each Sunday of Advent, it is as though the Spirit brings us deeper into the Presence by bringing us closer to having our feet on the ground, closer to the present, and closer to our hearts. The Divine heart surgeon carries on reconfiguring our desires so that we can inhabit both the Presence and the present. For how else can we be made alive?

"And this means learning how to be stretched, how to long, how to hope, how to be vulnerable to failure. This is the route without undergoing which there is no Coming. For if we cannot be taken to the end of ourselves, stretched beyond our capacity to imagine a salvation, have our longing forged against the hard anvil of apparent impossibility, then we are still wanting something that is a continuation of our selves, and not the Other who is Coming in.

"There is scarcely a more poignant communication in the New Testament than John’s message from prison: “Art Thou the One who is to come, or wait we for another?” Here is a heart stretched towards a fulfilment that is not of his making, and in the face of which he is vulnerable to a sense of shame, loss and futility. Given what he is undergoing, how can he be sure that he was even pointing in the direction of God’s breaking in? Will this One vindicate him against the enemy who holds him in a dungeon? Even he runs the risk of being scandalized by Jesus.

"The presence of the One who is coming in had been vastly easier to talk about when its time was not yet at hand. And yet now, as it comes in, the presence is very unlike how John, as all the prophets before him, had imagined him. The Presence becomes much more difficult to identify as it draws closer to us in time and place. Shouldn’t the criteria be clearer? Shouldn’t it be more obvious that the One who comes in will recompense his faithful ones and wreak vengeance on evil doers?

"Our Lord replies in two ways. First he replies to John. [...] The signs being given are those of the Creator breaking in to fulfil his creation, which is what the promised redemption was all about. John’s heart, stretched beyond parchedness can rest on this knowledge – can be satisfied, for to the heart attuned to the One who is no part of the order of existing things, a prophet’s heart, a sign of the creative work of God being made manifest is already the greatest refreshment that can be given. It allows the heart to rest on the giver.

"And Our Lord even recognises for John that at the very end of being stretched towards the Other who is coming in, there does lie the risk of scandal. There lies the risk that we will interpret the One according to our own pattern of desire, make of him a resolution of our partisan needs, and so be scandalized into not recognising the real One who comes. If however we are not scandalised, we are set free, we no longer need fear the social other which surrounds us, because we are confident of being held in the regard of that power which is coming in, and which is more solid than any form of group bonding, cultural togetherness or inter-personal prestige.

"Here, at the very edge of the stretched fulfilment, it is as if Jesus knows that by asking people to let go of the very notion of vengeance, of divine retribution, he leaves them with two options – to trust in the goodness of the One coming in, or to be locked in scandal at the collapse of partisan goodness and the constant need to build it up again. This latter possibility is indeed the arrival of a new sort of wrath, but rather than being divine wrath, it is a purely human wrath, one no less powerful for that. A human wrath that is a being enclosed into a scandalised imagination in the face of a goodness far too gentle for it to behold.

"Our Lord then turns to those he was teaching, and comments on John: when the crowds went out to the desert to be baptised, was it just a celebrity show, a collective display of mourning? This week we have an ascetic celebrity. Next week we will have a Hollywood starlet? Yet the crowd fascination is just the same. Was this all there was to John? No indeed! He was indeed part of the solidity of God’s self manifestation, nothing futile about him. The crowd was right to pick up that there was something of God here. Just as John was stretched, even in his imprisonment, so he had been sent to stretch hearts and imaginations towards the fulfilment so that others might find themselves closer to being able to receive the One coming in.

"Yet, and here Jesus is adamant. There is a difference not only in degree, but in kind, between the imagination of John, stretched as it was, concerning the things of God, and the imagination of those who are to find themselves ushered into the Presence, one where human violence has been taken inside himself by the one undergoing the sacrifice, and where there is no violence coming out at all.

"[...] It is easier now for us than for the stretched prophets, for, if only we would remember it, we have seen what John did not live to see: the full purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. Not as add-on qualities but as the full purpose of the Lord. The One coming in wants to show us that there is no violence in him at all.

"Did I say that makes it easier? What is it like to be stretched out in a wrathful world in expectation of the arrival of an incommensurable power who is not wrathful at all?"

- James Alison, from "A Stretching Fulfilment" (https://www.facebook.com/JesustheForgivingVictim/posts/pfbid02jEPbChUdUmBwb3zhpmSAzSiof9kgb8LrBeBhPxDepiTHWQwtqN5wmhj5ZGBn6Z8gl)

~

"Remember that Jesus caused scandal to those who are too good rather than those who are too bad, to those who wanted to sort things out quickly rather than for those who are weak, too weak to do anything. The scandal of Jesus is the scandal of the one who is non-violent and who is going to make a God entirely available as one in whom there is no violence. And now we're on the threshold of beginning to sense what strange potential scandal is coming into our midst as the apocalyptic noise begins to diminish and our Saviour's birth draws nearer."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Third Sunday in Advent 2022 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dYXcF3ZXpQ)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/advent3a/]

From the Lectionary for 7 December 2025 (Advent 2A)

Matthew 3:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
    make his paths straight.’”

Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

~

"How is the Presence working on us? Once again the liturgy gives us three different prods into life. And as the sound of portentous thunder diminishes, without disappearing yet, so we start to find ourselves being trained towards perceiving a somewhat different shape to the One who comes than our fantasies and our fears had constructed for us.

"A hypnotist summons a temporary new conscious self into being, by getting us to concentrate on something outside ourselves while, below the level of that of which we are conscious, the set of relationships which cause us to think and perceive as we do are worked on. In liturgy, the jostling together of the different voices from Scripture while we are summoned into concentrating on One who is coming, enables us to continue our journey of re-birth. Our new self is quickened into existence as the Spirit awakens in us someone who we didn’t know we were, but who turns out to be more ourselves than we thought we knew. So the jostling and the puncturing continue apace.

[...]

"[We] have John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, pointing to the fulfilment of his own work. And yet he too is out of focus. He knows that only a change of heart and mind will enable people to begin to perceive the shape of the One who is to come, for with our current mindsets we cannot imagine the shape of the Presence. He also knows that between his preparation of people, and the shape of the Presence to come there is an incommensurable distance. Yet even he who was of priestly family can scarcely understand that his rite of public penance and purification would also be the rite of ordination of the Great High Priest who was to come, and thereafter of all of us who are to have our access to the Holy of Holies laid open by his Sacrifice.

"Why his hostility to the many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism? He knows how dangerous apparent goodness is, that is all our grasped goodness, and the sense of entitlement which comes with it. He was aware of how dangerous to such goodness was the One who is to come, but [...] he seems unable to grasp that the One who is coming will turn out indeed to be the bearer of all that dangerousness, only because of the fear and resentment of those in whose midst he will be. Not because there is any violence or vengeance in himself.

"We have not yet undergone the extraordinary shift in perception and imagination which comes upon us when we understand that in the One who comes, there is no violence at all, no vengeance, no desire for retribution, only a longing for us to be fully alive. And that all our fears, our desires for revenge, our stumbling blocks, which we so easily project onto God, are ours, ours alone, and able to be undone, let go, forgiven, by the One who is coming in."

- James Alison, from "Reflections on Advent: A Jostling Fulfilment (Second Sunday of Advent)" (https://www.facebook.com/JesustheForgivingVictim/posts/pfbid02aMpottGmS3WZK3xzHUHhr8m3ffNuq5tySGxjX1PUyf6sjo8dVt8XiNdpzHncWXH9l)

~

"So here we have John coming in, indicating, if you like, the threatening nature of what's going on, and people knowing that they must do something to change, and already there being all sorts of political [and] religious reaction of the sort to which we're entirely accustomed. As we live this, how do we hear this? What would it be like for someone to come and occupy one of our liminal spaces, someone who has proved themselves capable of speaking wise words, [...] someone who has, let's say, acquired credibility, so that they're not perceived as enacting cheap cosplay but are actually able to say a word?

"What would it look like for us to feel moved by that person, to say, 'gosh, yes, there's a point there, something must be happening'? [...] What would it be like to hear the words and start to repent? What would it look like, then, to start being discerning [about] what the one coming in is bringing? How will we know? How will we be able to follow? How will we recognize and be recognized? That's how our Advent journey is developing."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Second Sunday in Advent 2022 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWtQvHN1g4o)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/advent2a/]

From the Lectionary for 30 November 2025 (Advent 1A)

Isaiah 2:2-5 (NRSV Updated Edition)

In days to come
    the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
    and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
    Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
    and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction
    and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
 He shall judge between the nations
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
    neither shall they learn war any more.
O house of Jacob,
    come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!

Matthew 24:36-44 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in the days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so, too, will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken, and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

~

"One of the things I love about the liturgical life of the Church is the way that the Holy Spirit, quietly and gently, works on us. Through the texts and prayers set out for us each year in the lectionary the Spirit draws us ever more fully into the Presence. If we read the texts in a literalistic manner, it can sounds as though, week by week it is God who is undergoing change toward us. In fact, however, in the liturgy of the Presence it is we who are worked on through the scriptures and the prayers, we who get to be reconfigured and brought in to the life of the Changeless One.

"At Advent, it begins again: the cycle by which God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that the Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our myths, our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is “religious” rather than what is holy, alive, and real. So, lest we be tempted to think that “Advent” is merely a religious warm-up for “Christmas”, let us see if we can allow ourselves to be brought near the cold-water spigot whose splashes can chasten us into reality.

"Someone wants to speak to us. Someone who is not on the same level as us at all. The “oomph” behind the “isness” of everything that is wants to invite us into the fulness of a project. Can that One get through? Who are they? Will we be able to hear them? How trained are our ears? The assumption at the beginning of each liturgical year is that this is going to be difficult: that we are half asleep, our ears dulled, and the voice of One who loves us is too radiant bright to be picked up on our defensive antennae. [...]

"The announcement with which we begin, from Isaiah, plays to our sense of the physically portentous. It gives us a mountain which is being lifted up. It plays to our sense of religious grandeur. For the mountain is Zion, where Jerusalem is built. And it plays to any apocalyptic sense we may have, for out of this physically and religiously charged place there is to emerge a teaching, and an instruction, which will also be a judgment, a criterion for all peoples. And this criterion, this instruction, this judge, sitting with authority, will be heeded by all nations, who will then enter into the ways of peace.

[...]

"[W]hat is the sense of the prophecy? We are used to two possibilities: on the one hand, prophecy being punctured by reality, and our settling for far, far less than our imaginations were excited into expecting; or on the other hand prophecies being fulfilled, and our being given a boost to our expectations and our sense of who we are and what we deserve.

"Advent, however, gives us neither of these. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we are given both. For what we are going to get used to hearing is the still small voice of punctured fulfilment. That is to say, our receiving far more than we imagined we might get from the prophecy, but our getting it through the process of the loss of fantasy. And this is what Our Lord warns his disciples about: the coming is not going to happen according to our measure, nor is it likely to be picked up by us. Only the spirit that is trained in punctured fulfilment is likely to get it.

"Jesus points it out very clearly: there is no human criterion at all that is capable of knowing how the Creator’s design to fulfil creation is going to look. Majority expectations are not safe, like those of Noah’s contemporaries. Who could tell that with Cain killing Abel in the field (one taken, the other left) judgment would begin? Or what the shape of that judgment would be? Or who could tell with the deaths of the firstborn of the Egyptian slave women working alongside their Hebrew counterparts at the grinding stone (Exodus 11,5) what sign from God was about to emerge?

"And yet, as our imagination of the One who is coming undergoes its inevitable puncturing, so that we can be awakened to One whose criteria are not our criteria, the promise will be fulfilled. The One who is coming will not preside over us, but will teach us to want peace from within, and to learn the habits that make it possible. The One who loves us will come as one we despise, and crucify. The definitive puncturing of our god-fantasies, and yet the Presence of one who is powerfully determined not to let us remain wedded to our self-destruction."

- James Alison, from "A Puncturing Fulfillment" (https://www.facebook.com/JesustheForgivingVictim/posts/pfbid02ow1QEbeNZmRcaF4RLSYHmVeY3UDi2em9geJRtzvDH8D9C6r557nhk2ZwssSUV7A5l)

~

"I think that the whole point [of this teaching in this passage from Matthew's gospel] is: this is not obvious. You need to be on the inside of something and discern something. From the outside it is going to look odd - two in the field, one taken one left; two grinding meal together, one taking one left. What is it going to look like to be in a position to discriminate, in the good sense, to discern what's going on? Wherever there are two people, wherever normal-seeming things are in fact riven through by the hints of glory - or ruin.

"“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” So the coming of the Son of Man, and the central message of this passage: keep awake, [...] stay awake. And I think that that's the difficult key that we're being asked to do in Advent, which is staying awake sufficiently to be able to discriminate, to discern what is going on in the midst of our world, so that when normal-seeming things are in fact shot through with heavenly decision-making processes. And in the midst of them the Lord is coming. And it's coming as a surprise, we do not know it so no complacency is possible [...]

"“But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.” [...] But Jesus has said just before, “You do not know on what day *your* lord is coming,” which suggests that it's not the negative thing that he's concerned about but rather the people who because we think of the Lord as on our side, think of him as our Lord and say, “Lord, Lord.” Because of that we assume that it's going to be coming in a way that will be easy for us to pick up, that we will be able to detect it, that it will, as it were, be obvious from our point of view because we know what's right and what's wrong. [But] the suggestion [is] that, actually, that's the most dangerous position to be in, because if we think we know then we're going to be greatly deceived. We have to really become aware of the possibility that the coming is happening in our midst in ways we don't know and which do not flatter our sense of belonging, our sense of what is good and bad, our sense of what is right and wrong.

[...]

"So this, at the beginning of Advent, my sisters and brothers, I suspect is what we're being asked to enter into: discernment [of] all the things that are going on, where we are with the relation to all of them, how much of it seems normal, how much of it seems scandalous and full of huge turbulence and uprisings and so on - the chapter immediately before this verse is precisely about those things. So the strange mixture of normal things going on while there are huge upheavals going on makes it very difficult for us to be, as it were, planted in both and yet still alive for the One who is coming in, still prepared for all the glory that is going to come in such [a] small form, is going to be so strange for us to learn and is going to take us into the kingdom."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for First Sunday in Advent 2022 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-NWVUIo7Ro)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/advent1a/]

From the Lectionary for 23 November 2025 (Christ the King Sunday, Year C)

Jeremiah 23:5-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”

Luke 23:33-43 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

~

"As I have both studied and written about Jesus and the gospels, and as I have tried to lead and teach Christian communities that were doing their best to follow Jesus and order their lives by the gospels, I have had the increasing impression, over many years now, that most of the Western Christian tradition has simply forgotten what the gospels are really all about. Despite centuries of intense and heavy industry expended on the study of all sorts of features of the gospels, we have often managed to miss the main thing that they, all four of them, are most eager to tell us. I have therefore come to the conclusion that what we need is not just a bit of fine-tuning, an adjustment here and there. We need a fundamental rethink about what the gospels are trying to say, and hence about how best we should read them, together and individually. And - not least - about how we then might order our life and work in accordance with them.

"[...] The question, then, is not only: Can we learn to read the gospels better, more in tune with what their original writers intended? It is also: Can we discover, by doing this, a new vision for God's mission in the world, in and through Jesus, and then - now! - in and through his followers? And, in doing so, can we grow closer together in mission and life, in faith and hope, and even in love? Might a fresh reading of the gospels, in other words, clear the way for renewed efforts in mission and unity? Is that what it would look like if we really believed that the living God was king on earth as in heaven?

"That, after all, is the story all four gospels tell. [...] I am here dealing with the four that were recognized, from very early on, as part of the church’s “rule of life,” that is, part of the “canon”: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the story that the four evangelists tell is the story, as in my title, of “how God became king.”

"This, I discover, comes as a surprise to most people, and an unwelcome shock to some. It appears, as we say today, counterintuitive; that is, the claim that God has become king doesn’t seem to square with the world as we know it. “If God is really king, why is there still cancer? Why are there still tsunamis? Why are there still tyranny, genocide, child abuse, and massive economic corruption?”

"What’s more, as we shall see, some people, not least some Christians, appear allergic to the very idea of God becoming, or being, “king.” “Isn’t God as king triumphalist? Doesn’t that lead us toward that dreaded word “theocracy”? And isn’t that one of the problems of our day, not one of the solutions?”

"Questions like that are important. But even if the gospel writers had heard us asking them, they would not have backed off from the claim they were making."

- N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, pp. ix-x

~

"Christ is the royal man under the sign of the cross.  His whole life moved toward the cross as the enactment of reconciliation.  His cross was his coronation.  As the New Testament plainly reveals, we can know the royal man Jesus and ourselves in him, only as the one who was 'led by God' and 'harried by us' to his death.

"[...] [T]he royal man is a reflection of God in correspondence with his purpose and work. Here [Barth] has four points. (i) Jesus shares God's destiny in his disparagement, rejection, isolation, and concealment. (ii) He upturns all values by favoring the weak and humble, not the high and mighty. (iii) His approach to established orders is genuinely revolutionary, cutting across all parties and programs, both conservative and progressive. (iv) He lives his life for men as Savior, not against them as Judge."

- G. W. Bromiley, An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, pages 203, 201

~

"It's interesting that [in verse 35 the accusation] uses both of those: the Messiah of God, that's the anointed one, so that's the Davidic figure [...]; and the Chosen One. The chosen one was Israel rather than a particular figure. Saul is sometimes referred to as the Chosen One - the beginnings of the kingship of Israel. But “the chosen one,” this is a reference to Isaiah 28 where God is setting a foundation in Zion by placing a chosen stone, a precious one in his eyes.

"We'll see how important it comes to be because it's the distinction between precious and shame: the one that is chosen is the one that people think “yes, this is something being done for us”; and the other one is a shame, so they're saying it right, but they're saying it so as to shame him. We're going to see how important that dichotomy between the chosen one and the shamed one is, because everything in today's Gospel is around that fundamental dichotomy.

[...]

"I hadn't picked up the importance of the word “paradise” [v.43] until I looked up all the other times that the word paradise appears in the [...] Greek in the Septuagint. [...] And mostly it's meaning is “orchard.” Jesus is clearly making a reference to the tree as the Tree of Life, which is of course in Paradise in the garden, the orchard in Genesis and in Ezekiel. And then there is the curse of the tree [in Deut. 21:23].

"So the whole question is, are you part of the lynch mob, in which case there is a curse going on here, or do you recognize that this is the Tree of Life? There are two trees, or rather there are two people interpreting the tree in an entirely different way. And the one who recognizes that this one is entirely innocent, that the one who is being falsely accused is the source of Life, that one has perceived that what looked like a place of shame is in fact the precious place that has been put down as a new foundation [cf. Isaiah 28:16 - Therefore thus says the Lord God, “See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation” (NRSVUE)].

"In other words, all these references bring out the duality of what is going on here. On the one hand, something positive coming into being so that Jesus really is the principle of all the powers of the world, he really is going to be able to feed the people, he really is going to be the new Temple - those temptations which he'd overcome. And he is actually opening up the Tree of Life, making it possible to come into of the garden, the orchard, the beginning of New Creation.

"So that's how Luke shows both how our forgiveness works and at the same time how what is going on is vastly more powerful than an individual scene but a place where all the kings and princes of this world gather together look at the king as anointed and don't know what they see. It's Psalm 2 that is being re-enacted here beautifully at the centre of Luke's passion."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Christ the King 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x_omW0f7KM)

[Source of N.T. Wright quote, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/xrstking_c/]

From the Lectionary for 16 November 2025 (Proper 28C):

Luke 21:5-19 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.

“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defence in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

~

"The world Jesus paints describes those days when the sacrificial mechanism humans have depended on no longer works, when the temple’s pretty façade has fallen, and the stones of the building lie about all a kilter, in those days all hell will break lose. Everybody will be against their neighbor. It will be a time when you will be betrayed by your parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends. They will execute some of you. We may be entering those days.

"Because Jesus-followers won’t be pointing toward others with an accusing finger but rather pointing toward God who loves all and does not wish that any be sacrificed, they will be hated by everyone. A culture built on division and hatred will especially hate Jesus-followers because Jesus-followers give witness to the truth that all are of value and none expendable.

"After all of this Jesus still leaves us a word of comfort. He assures us that “Still, not a hair on your heads will be lost.” He tells us we will make it through whole. At the deepest level we will be in one piece. And more than that, “by holding fast, you will gain your lives.” Dear friends, we are in the process of gaining our lives."

- Thomas L. Truby, from a sermon delivered on November 13, 2016 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Truby-Proper28-2016-Gaining-Our-Lives.pdf)

~

"In fact Jesus's so-called apocalyptic discourse is really a 'how not to be run by an apocalyptic imagination' discourse. It's how not to be fooled by this world of fascinating signs. [...] Please notice what Jesus is doing is he's trying to get people off fascination with charismatic people, fascination with the temple and the notion of God's anger associated with it. He's saying, “Pay no attention to such things, do not go after them.”

[...]

"What's wrong, if you like, with this world of signs and fascinations is, we look at a particular struggle or a particular upheaval and think about it in terms of it giving us meaning by there being the bad guy who [is] being destroyed, so we must be the good guy. And the trouble with that of course is that if you think that, you're failing to notice what is actually going on in your own group, you're still being run by the need to justify yourself over against another group.

"So each one of these [Nation w ill rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven] is not Jesus saying this is what's going to happen, he's saying these kind of quotes, these kind of attitudes to prophetic happenings, those are all the wrong way of looking at things, that's all something in the midst of which you must learn a certain indifference.

[...]

"The Ignatian understanding of indifference is: not allowing rivalry to push my buttons. That kind of indifference is what therefore enables us curiously to be creative and actually free in the midst of whatever is going on, and bearing witness to another reality, something that is not run by the violence of the scapegoating of this world.

[...]

"By your endurance, your patience, your perseverance, in other words by your standing in the midst of all this, not being run by it and so bearing witness to that which is being brought into being, you will gain your souls. That is what being brought into being as a son or a daughter of God looks like. It looks like being turned into a witness of another sign, a completely different sign. Instead of the world of temple, of violent sacred, fake goodness, of political and even of tribal and family violent construction of goodness, in the midst of all that, working through it all, not run by its meaning, being given the meaning that comes from God, that is the living of the Kingdom."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Thirty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXni9LDFM9U)

[Source of link to Thomas Truby sermon and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper28c/]

From the Lectionary for 9 November 2025 (Proper 27C)

Luke 20:27-38 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

~

"The Sadducees had couched their question ironically, within a familiar [1st century] backdrop. Jesus, in reply, gives as his example of the Scriptures and the power of God the story of Moses and the Bush from the book of Exodus, where God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Jesus' point is that for God who knows not death, those people, long dead in terms of the supposed historical chronology of Moses' life, were alive. If they were alive to God, contaminated as it were with God's utter aliveness, held in presence by one whose presence is beyond time, then they are alive. It's God's aliveness that counts in understanding all these things."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pg. 165

~

"So when, earlier, Jesus had said to the Sadducees that they didn't understand the power of God [...], now we begin to understand what this power might consist in. Jesus isn't talking about some special power to do something miraculous, like raising someone from the dead. Rather he's giving an indication of the sort of power which characterizes God, something of the quality of who God is. This ‘power’, this quality which God always is, is that of being completely and entirely alive, living without any reference to death.

"There is no death in God. God has nothing to do with death, and for that reason facts which are obvious to us, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob having been long dead at the time of Moses, simply do not exist for God. Let's put this another way: for us ‘being alive’ means ‘not being dead’; it's a reality which is circumscribed by its opposite. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with death, and cannot even be contrasted with death."

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pg. 38

~

"“Because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” [v.36] Now that simply sounds as though he's saying something, it doesn't actually sound like an argument. I think that it's worth trying to bring out some of the heft of what is behind that, because it's a difficult thing. He's suggesting that in this age marrying and giving marriage is for the production of offspring and that's perfectly fine, but the age to come, the resurrection, works on an entirely different principle. The resurrection is not something that happens to dead people. It's a form of being alive that God has already begun in some people before they are dead, and once they're dead they become alive in the resurrection. In other words, the driving force, if you like, between their being alive comes from God and that can start now.

"The same was hinted at when Jesus told the disciples to rejoice not that the evil spirits obeyed them but that their name was written in heaven. The notion of the name being written in heaven means that the driving force of who you are is something that is coming from elsewhere and turning you into a witness to it, rather than you being started from here and becoming a simple reproduction of a system going on indefinitely.

"So it's the driving points that are different. So having suggested that what's important here is not whether your driving point is the reproductive one but whether your driving point is the one from heaven who has as it were brought you into being and turned you into a witness to it's presence in the world during your life. In which case your marital status is neither here nor there, it's part of your relationship to other people that has reproduced God's original Adam and or Eve as one person. You're going back to a zero point, an Omega point before creation, that's what's being brought into being.

[...]

"In other words, the resurrection is God's life, it's the utter livingness the effervescence of Life of God which here on Earth turns people into Sons and Daughters, inviting them to share in God's life. It's a logical thing, it's not to do with “Am I Immortal?” It's “Is my name written in heaven?” In which case I am being brought into Life by the utterly living effervescent God.

"I want to bring this up because it's important for us. So many of us have an understanding of immortality, the resurrection, eternal life, as things which start from here: “Is there something Immortal in me and am I going to last forever?” Whereas it's quite clear from Jesus's understanding that none of this starts from here. The whole point of God is that the utter effervescence and aliveness of God - everything starts from there. And we are, if you like, dialogically called into it. We are being created, started from above, given a name from above, so that our flesh becomes the life of a son and daughter of God in the midst of this age but not run by this age.

"That's his picture: we are started from elsewhere. And this elsewhere is utterly alive, which is why we don't need to be frightened of death and its consequences. The starting, being started, from elsewhere, so difficult for modern individualists to understand, and something which of course was disconcerting to people who want a very stable social order, one above all where unhelpful things like hope are not encouraged lest it leads to uprisings and changes to the social order, which of course carried on happening in the immediate aftermath of Jesus's life, as we all know, with relation to Jerusalem and the Romans. But the utterly alive Life Of God, starting us from elsewhere, is what we are being summoned into."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXqZiV7o4w)

[Source of quotes from Jesus the Forgiving Victim and Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper27c/]

From the Lectionary for 2 November 2025 (Proper 26C)

Luke 19:1-10 (NRSV Updated Edition)

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

~

"That Jesus had discerned the social matrix of Jericho rightly was immediately manifest when Jesus called out to the tax collector and invited himself to that man's house. St. Luke says that “all who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”’ (Lk. 19:7) Here is another example of Luke's astute anthropological insight. It isn't just the Pharisees and scribes who grumble about Zacchaeus. Everybody grumbles about him. Like Simon when confronted with the Woman Who Was a Sinner (Lk. 7:36-50), the people of Jericho were thinking that if this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of man this was who was sitting up in a tree - that he was a sinner. One doesn't have to be a demonically possessed man or a sinful woman to be a communal scapegoat. A rich man who is a traitor to his people can hold the same position. And deserve it. After all, he was treading down the downtrodden. For scapegoating others, he deserved to be scapegoated. [...] The challenge of this story [...] is not limited to the possible conversion of one person. It extends to the possible conversion of the whole community."

- Andrew Marr, Moving and Resting in God's Desire, pp. 101-03

~

"This is Jesus' simple message: Holiness is no longer to be found through separation from or exclusion of, but in fact, the radical inclusion (read “forgiveness”) of the supposedly contaminating element. Any exclusionary system only lays the solid foundation for violence in thought, word and deed. So he has to lead us on a new path: “He will give the people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:77) and inclusion of the enemy (Matthew 5:44), and even departure from what we think is ourself (Mark 8:34-38).

"My lifetime of studying Jesus would lead me to summarize all of his teaching inside of two prime ideas: forgiveness and inclusion. Don't believe me; just go through the Gospels, story by story. It is rather self-evident. Forgiveness and inclusion are Jesus' “great themes.” They are the practical name of love, and without forgiveness and inclusivity love is largely a sentimental valentine. They are also the two practices that most undercut human violence."

- Richard Rohr, Things Hidden, pp. 150-51

~

"[...] Zacchaeus is no longer cowed, no longer hiding, no longer small, no longer run by the way he was tied in to the crowd before. Luke emphasizes the physical gesture: Zacchaeus stands tall, and immediately sets about reconstructing a whole new way of being together with his fellow citizens, not concerned with his goodness or badness, happy to work through the details of accusations of impropriety, about which the murmuring crowd will have had more than a thing or two to say, but more than that, completely concerned with his new way of belonging to Israel.

[...]

"Luke ends by pointing up something which [is] also clear in the Emmaus passage [in Luke 24]. There the two travellers thought they were the hosts and Jesus their guest, only to find that he was hosting them, and had been the protagonist of the story of which they had thought themselves knowledgeable, all along. Part of what the presence of Jesus in the midst of people feels like is just this curious inversion of perspective, and of protagonism.

"At the beginning of our story here, it is Zacchaeus who seeks to see who Jesus is, working around all the complexities of his relationship with the crowd so as to get a glimpse. But from the moment that Jesus looks up at him, calls him by name and tells him he must spend the night in his house, it is clear that the whole protagonism has been inverted. Not only is it, once again, the apparent guest who is the real host. But all along, it was the regard of Another other that was deliberately seeking out this particular person, Zacchaeus.

"Zacchaeus' seeking of Jesus had been real, if still embryonic; it was the seeking of someone who was tied up in a very complex pattern of desire. Perhaps the beginning of Zacchaeus' being found lay in the fact that, as part of his lostness, he had had to begin to uncouple himself from the immediacy of crowd desire, just so as to be able to get a look at Jesus. Even that uncoupling, leading to his moment of unexpected vulnerability, is part of the process of his receiving the regard which recreated him, is part of what being sought and found by Another other looks like."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 377-79

~

"“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” And so here you have the reference back to what happens in the beginning of the [story] with Zacchaeus seeking out but Jesus seeing him. And all along the sensation that we may think that we're seeking out but we are being sought out, and that is the way how grace works, how forgiveness works. And forgiveness reaches us and has as its fruit the breaking open of heart and the giving away of things, that's how forgiveness produces penitence in us and shows us to be Sons and Daughters of Abraham."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Thirty First Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjwgdNNO_aM)

[Source of quotes from Andrew Marr, Richard Rohr and James Alison's Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper26c/]