Bryan Richardson

Strong

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 9:20-22 (day three)

“Daughter, take courage.”

It turns out that strength isn’t just for the warriors, or the wealthy, or the kings or the commanders, or celebrated, or the storied. Jesus indicates that the hidden and the humble and the marginalized and the minority and the invisible and insignificant may lay claim to the very steadfastness the world has said belongs only to the powerful. That a person who is by society’s reckoning a common peasant of unremarkable lineage is called to courage as a daughter of Abraham – this is new. On that day, Jesus restored this poor woman to a place of strength greater than that of Imperial Rome. One is faced with either relearning how to live in the presence of people or ignoring what has just happened to the human race. May we with Christ call the weak to strength.

Awaken

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 9:18-19; 23-26 (day three)

“The girl has not died, but is asleep.”

Jesus does not use a euphemism here. As far as we can tell, he does not aim to downplay or dress up death. Jesus talks this way because in the presence of God, death does not possess finality. Jesus raises this girl to life to show everyone who’s looking that this girl’s ultimate future is life again in the body. Now, she would certainly die again in this age, but neither she nor her family would look at death In the same way anymore, because Christ altered what death had the power to do to the human race. For all who count on Christ, death has become sleep for the body, and most of your days are yet to come. That’s exactly the kind of reality everyone longs for, whether or not they’ve ever articulated it.

Safe

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 8:23-27 ((day three)

“Jesus himself was asleep.”

What had to have been true for Jesus to have slept soundly in the ship’s hold while a violent storm roiled the waters of the lake? At the very least, Jesus knew that the universe had not decided his fate. That was neither its prerogative nor its power. Did that mean drowning was out of the question? Not at all. “Natural disasters” occurred then, as now. Yet Jesus slept deeply. His sleep was not an object lesson – he really did sleep – but it was instructive. The act of sleeping said to his disciples, “I am at home in God’s good creation.” It’s what we might call a “grounding exercise” these days, but Jesus wrote the book on it. You are where you are on God’s earth, breathing God’s air, whatever else is true. Start there, and peace rises within.

Whole

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 8:14-17 (day three)

“He himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.”

Jesus never staged mass healings in which scores of anonymous people received health simultaneously and went happily on their way. Jesus’s pattern was to listen in rapt attention to individual persons as they or their loved ones described the suffering and misery disease had wrought in their bodies. The one time a person with illness attempted to remain unnoticed, Jesus stopped everything until he had looked on the face of the newly-healed one and heard her story. His touch healed her body; his attention healed her spirit. He will not leave a well body with a broken spirit. He will not redeem a spirit and leave a body moldering in the grave. He is the Savior of the entire person.

Value

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 8:1-4 (day three)

“Go, show yourself to the priest.”

Your body is intricately connected to your spiritual well-being. This must be affirmed, especially against the tendency to think that valuing the “inside” means devaluing the “outside”. Such reasoning is disastrous. When the body is thought of as having little value, people will violate others’ bodies with abandon. The resulting pain in the human race is staggering: body-image issues which devastate a person, human trafficking, abuses of power, unchecked disease, and more. God values the body so much that one day he will raise it from the dead. Accordingly, Jesus told the man whose body he healed that the only way to understand his healing and to nurture his body is to steward it within the community of those who will help him remember how fearfully and wonderfully he is made.

Scripture

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 4:1-11 (day three)

“Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”

Living in this world means wrestling with your capacity to do as you will. If you act as you please, what of others? If you act for the good of others, what of you? You don’t need the devil for that back-and-forth. What the devil does bring to the struggle, though, is support. You could use an ally. The devil’s called an adversary, but that role often manifests against the human race writ large. For you, though—well, for you the devil will be the one that agrees with you, the one that gets you, the one that tells you it’s time you get heard. Why do you even need God, then? That’s the very question scripture empowered our Lord to counter. May it so empower us.

Small

Re:Verse passage –Colossians 4:7-18 (day three)

“These are the only fellow workers for the kingdom of God who are from the circumcision, and they have proved to be an encouragement to me.”

Paul means Jews. He’s glad for the company of fellow Jews. Paul regards with deep warmth everyone he names in this passage, but it is with just a few that he seems to sustain his deepest intimacies. Friendship is by nature an exclusive undertaking. It is a selective and restrictive kind of life that will require one to dispense with the noble-sounding aspiration to be equally a friend to all. This is so because the learning of another soul is a tender and vulnerable pursuit requiring the revelation of weaknesses and the calling forth of character in small, quiet moments of risk and trust. Love for the whole world is nurtured in the diminutive room of friendship.

Treasure

Re:Verse passage – Colossians 4:2-6 (day three)

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt.”

It’s not uncommon for one to think of Jesus’s “fishers of men” phrase in terms of the dangling of bait and the hauling in of the prized catch. But one might also understandably recoil at the thought of baiting, or—to update the angling metaphor—“reeling in” a person. It seems more plausible that, rather than to the nabbing of unsuspecting prey, Jesus was referring to the traits of his disciples’ profession: patience, an understanding of habits and movements and times and seasons, a tolerance for unfruitful days, a respect for habitat, a willingness to learn from mentors, a comprehension of what threatens the work. Jesus leveraged these qualities to ensure that evangelism treasured people as people. Paul’s words teach us to do no less.

Slow

Re:Verse passage –Colossians 3:18-4:1 (day three)

“Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters.”

Brought to you by the Bible, home of “Put to death men and women, children and infants”(1 Samuel 15:3), and “Show them no mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2), among others. Will we ignore these words? Suppress them? Contextualize them? Think about this: Every children’s Bible you’ve ever seen in the hands of innocent little ones contains these verses. I know. Sobering. You’d think that if the Bible is supposed to reveal to us what’s right, it wouldn’t contain these problematic passages that people point to as reasons they distrust it. But the Bible isn’t just the story of God, it’s the story of God among us. And we change very slowly. Eventually, “Slaughter only in war” becomes “don’t slaughter.” “Mind your masters” becomes “submit to one another.” The Bible will leaven our hearts.

New

Re:Verse passage – Colossians 3:10-17 (day three)

“There is no distinction between Greek and Jew.”

Okay, then how am I to know who I’m dealing with? Jock, gamer, libertarian, fundamentalist, Unitarian, Asian, woman: Give me something to go on. Paul says, “No, we’re not going to assume things about each other according to those kinds of categories anymore. This is the day of the new human.” And yet, look around at the church in today’s world—our controversies, our disagreements, our expectations of each other. If we won’t understand one another within the church apart from pre-conceived identifiers, how in the world will we ever make a claim to anyone in the wider world that Christ can transform the way a person lives? You want to be a better patriot, a better teacher, a better boyfriend? Get a mentor. But if you want to become new, start over with Christ.