40 years in the wilderness

I have been reflecting upon this now in the light of Father’s day, having come and gone. Is God the father male, of course not as the book the Shack so delightfully depicts. Albeit that in that book Jesus, the son is male, whilst father and Spirit are female. But of course there is no gender in God in the sense that we understand that distinction. And I was pondering, I like to think like Jesus’ mother Mary was wont to do, Paul’s famous dictum “Now in Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile, male nor female, slave or free, for all are one in Christ Jesus”. He suggests that in Christ there is an end to all binary distinctions by which ‘we’ gain out ID over and against 'them’. So here in Cambridge we are entering into the season of overseas visitors with all the students departed for the summer. And the distinction between us and them is never more clear than when they take to the roads on their hire bikes! And I wondered whether it was because Paul’s doctrine of the Trinity was so s...

I have been somewhat stuck with the story of Jesus in the Temple as a twelve year old boy. He is discussing the Hebrew scriptures with the teachers of the law. His parents cannot find him and when Mary questions him he replies: Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house? This is not in my opinion a rebuke so much as an invitation to his Mum to go on pondering. The ten infancy narratives of which this is the last at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel give us an insight. Mary AND Jesus are pondering who he is why he has come and how to understand this incarnation in the light of their own scriptures. Mary’s song after her initial encounter with Elizabeth whose husband had also been visited by an angel turns the expected norms of those scriptures upside down. We should expect nothing less inn the person and ministry of Jesus. And the boy Jesus invites Mary to go on ‘seeing’ this revelation/manifestation of God for what it truly is. For in Jesus the God of the Hebrew script...