He told them a story - 5.3.25

Since we started the week with Jesus’ dark and foreboding apocalyptic discourse, let’s finish the week there, for right after verbally bursting into this dark apocalypse landscape with the radiant epiphany of his coming, he launches, as he so often does, into story mode as he encouraged his disciples to literally give a fig to their fears. Look at the fig tree, he tells us, which leads to the instruction to “pray constantly” – not as an exhaustive ongoing performance but as a persistently liberating posture as we take our fear out for a walk and keep working on that useful list. And so, after all he had told them – after all the hell breaking loose, all the tumult of nations and hearts failing for fear…