Bryan Richardson

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.

Being

Re:Verse passage – Colossians 3:1-9 (day three)

“You laid aside the old man.”

Sexual preoccupation, revenge-seeking, fixation on material gain, grudge-holding. Might as well face it, you don’t know any other way to live. Even if none of these exact things are your jam, it’s the way things are done around here. And if you should refuse to give in to such vices, it seems you’ve really left yourself vulnerable to the powerful people who’ve learned the ways of the world. But Paul invites you to leave that way of being completely behind. It’s not that you or I have the opportunity to stop doing bad things, but to become, over time, a new kind of human. Not merely a being who does good things in a bad world, but a new kind of being whose life will light the way for those who knew no other way existed.

Preempt

Re:Verse passage – Colossians 2:16-23 (day three)

“No one is to act as your judge.”

Paul knows what he’s taking about. He left Pharisaism and entered a religious tradition—Christianity—already beleaguered by the most powerful rules humanity has ever known: unwritten rules. And this was a man who was shaping Christianity in its earliest expression. Even he found himself on the receiving end of condemnation by fellow believers. Paul encountered judgmental voices, and so will you. One of the most inviting ways to respond is to adopt the motto “Judge first lest ye be judged.” Is anybody listening to Paul’s words?

Cut

Re:Verse passage – Colossians 2:8-15 (day three)

“a circumcision made without hands…”

Modern Westerners get a little squeamish regarding language that refers to the human body. But unless we face forthrightly the practice and place of circumcision in Hebrew civilization, we will have no reference point by which to comprehend the meaning of Paul’s language. The cutting of the male body in this way stood as an irreversible and visible sign that the spiritual realm was making an inroad into the material realm so that the totality of the human person—spirit and mind and body and social context—was now devoted to God. This is why Paul adopts such a metaphor. The church’s irreversible and visible devotion to Christ will be conveyed in human language by nothing less than such a drastic term. The beauty of Paul’s metaphor will trump any polite squeamishness.