Canter Bridge

As to seasick disciples on a turbulent Sea of Galilee, Jesus sometimes appears out of context, seeming very much to be a ghost. He comes at an angle from which we expect only threat and danger, messengers of an alien chaos that could only devour us.

Amazingly, to his disciples’ cry of ‘It is a ghost!’ (for who else comes walking on water through a storm but weird, destroying things?), Jesus’ reply echoes the long, biblical pattern by which unsought appearances of the divine are announced by just these words: ‘Don’t be afraid!’

But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Quite reasonably, we fear that chaos which we cannot control. Yet very much to our amazement, Jesus often approaches us most promisingly from out of that very disorder. He is not to be controlled. Yet we ought to welcome rather than fear him when he comes to us this way. Or if we cannot do that, then at least we may hear his words of friendly intimacy: ‘Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.’

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In Jesus’ teaching, blessing is a deep paradox. It does not come to those who seem most likely to have achieved it. Its credentials are counter-intuitive. Blessing descends in sharp contradiction to the appearances of candidacy. (more…)

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The gospel according to Matthew, one of the four canonical literary glimpses of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that are afforded us, peers attentively into Israel’s past. Indeed, this portrait of Jesus and his way in this world finds its guiding framework in the Old Testament. Matthew will frequently refer to a word or action of Jesus with a ‘this is that’ formula that anchors the thing to some fixed point in the witness of the Hebrew Bible. (more…)

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