The reader of the Gospel of Mark must mark the stark contrast between Jesus’ view of His kingdom and that of His immediate disciples. While Jesus descends from the throne to the cross, His disciples only imagine their comfortable ascension to their thrones.
If the Coronavirus pandemic highlights anything, it is that to be human is to be interdependent, finite, and dependent. This virus has thrown a tiny spanner into humanity’s project of self-procured immortality, independence, and self-reliance.
I write in response to Muniini K. Mulera’s article Time to ordain women bishops in the Church of Uganda, published by the Daily Monitor of March 3, 2020.
Voltaire once voiced how “In the beginning, God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favour ever since.” The history of fallen humanity is that we have, since the sin of Adam, fashioned God after our image.
My Facebook page was open as I prepared to go for Sunday service this morning. On it was a live feed from a church, and the pastor was speaking. As I listened to him, something restlessly recoiled within me.
Opulence naturally appeals to us. Poverty repels. Therefore, prosperity preaching is as popular as it is perilous.
Romans crucified criminals. The cross was the cruellest torturous tool for execution. Unlike now, crosses in the ancient world were not donned as necklaces but dreaded as demons.
1 John 4:17 excites many who find in it a liberation from the seeming insignificance of being human.
The phrase ‘irresistible grace’ resounded in my ears with echoes of beautiful complexity since I heard of it. Hard to believe and yet freeing, it spoke of the relentless pursuit by God for me, a rebel unaware of his need and unmoved to repentance by self-will.
The African concept of Ubuntu, which loosely translates as ‘I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am’ insists that to be human consists in a continual community of being, knowing, and becoming.
