Who do the People say I am?
Who do you say I am?
I am friends with people that are really, really into the prosperity end of the faith. I am much more at the polar opposite end on side with all poor monks and perpetual grovellers. At times the sheer juxtaposition of our worldviews oscillates between amusing-frustrating, but it is great fun.
To the one, everything is resurrection; to the other all centres on the cross.
One world is already pain and suffering-free; the other is the game of patient waiting on the emergent promise, putting up with the sunset on global brokenness.
To the one, their salvation, holiness and perfection are done; to the other it is a working out process.
The one lot live in perplexity over their faith when the mountains stare unmovingly back at them; the other has every excuse for chronic sickness, failure, poverty and weakness fully rehearsed.
The one lot are bold, confident and strident; the others are strung up on all sorts of lousy self-image scars.
During this Passover, I thought about suffering, death, resurrection and ascension.
Then it seemed to me that in the gospel accounts, Jesus constantly challenged people about their little faith.
Or that they do not recognise who it is that they are dealing with in him.
Or that humanity almost exclusively is cognitively dim, blind, deaf, hard-hearted, lost, brutish, and barely beyond the animal-like sheep, goats and mineral stones.
If we can advance to the status of a child, it may even be an achievement.
Who do the people say that I am?
Who do you say I am?
Are you the King of the Jews?
Are you the one that is to come? (John the baptiser)
This misunderstood man is still an enigma right up to the present moment. We see dimly like the part-healed a blind man that Jesus healed twice. After my first healing, I too see blurred shadows.
The power of deep worship.
Worship, that allows words to settle and become clear. Words, in all their symbolic hesitancy and holes, take us to the Holy Spirit's dew of understanding revelation.
Brain neurons firing off under the symbolic stimulation to become essential (of essence).
Fantom thoughts of God to become endowed with the truth of God. Words to become miraculously flesh-lie real after the administrations of the divine wind.
God IS love.
God IS good.
Light
Life
All authority
Almighty (All mighty)
Dominion
Hallowed
Ruler
Lovingkindness
Patient
Peace
Creator
Owner
Adopter
Saviour
High Priest
And so faith (not as a transactional token to be traded for stuff-success-blessing) but as the enabling gift of seeing invisibleness, in its absolutely, undeniably, actual reality.
Depart from me, you that never knew me.
What if I know the words, but not the actuality it references?
What if faith is simply to see God as is. (not adding / not subtracting).
Will such a faith position, posture and state move all stubborn mountains?
Is the object of that faith still today hanging on a tree?
Grateful I am for that one day of tree hanging by jealous nails.
May I truly engage with it?
Grateful I am for an empty cavern with a bundle of embalming cloth tossed in the corner.
Grateful I am for ascending fog.
But NOW, if I could see, I would see hair as white as snow, a face golden with shiny glory, and a razor-sharp tongue. Eyes of infinity intelligence that see only the truth. Is this visage radiant with pure, complete, faultless acceptance, love and power?
Surround by mysteries and beings untold.
Shadowless and like glass.
Who am I worshipping?
Who are we dealing with?
To know, and then to know well enough that it is possible to love with all of this human heart, soul, mind, body, life, stuff, time left, works, circles of family, friends, neighbours, enemies - ever more expansive, ever encompassing oneness.