If God has a favourite colour, it is tartan!

At Pentecost, God creates a people whose purpose is to live out forgiveness, to live out the generosity of starting afresh.

People see the injustice and they want to challenge, want things to change. But is it achieved by making a lot of noise? Is it achieved by building on shared negativity and a shared enemy?

The blame game which now passes for so much political and societal discourse, indicates above all an anxiety, a fear, a dis-ease, a broken web of society, that is larger than anything it is in the gift of politicians alone to answer.

Thomas wants to know the way, but Jesus offers far more in return – he promised not only the way, but also truth and life.

To think about vocation is to explore something dynamic and active; not simply a sense of our identity, who we are; but who we might be, what we are called to do, and what we might grow into.

The [disciples] are so caught into their narrative of despair and despondency that they have no capacity to be present to the stranger who appears alongside them. It feels as though they barely notice him. I wonder whether they were a little exasperated with him for interrupting their grief fest.

It is noteworthy that receiving divine peace is not a mandate to relax, or to “clock-off.” Quite the opposite, it is a call to engage, it is a commission to continue the work begun by Jesus.

The resurrection is witness to the power that remakes relationships, the power which means we need not simply mirror that which is done to us. That freedom to respond in love, and faith, and hope, is what we celebrate this day, is the gift we are given today.

Time and again we choose complicity rather than challenge. We choose silence rather than using our voices. We choose to turn away, to deny all that is in front of our eyes. We go with the crowd rather than with our conscience.

Jesus says “where have you laid him?”, show me this tomb, this place where you have buried your Lazarus, the thing you loved and have buried. And when we take Him to that tomb and we show Him what that death has done to us before he does anything else, Jesus stands in that place of grief and sadness and weeps.

(T)he man born blind is not only fully human, but he is the one who will receive the fulness of God’s power working in him.