Loraena

“Yet Jesus went further. When people asked him for ‘a sign from heaven’, he saw their request as a sign of unbelief. They wanted things to be obvious. The only sign he would give them, he said, was another prophetic sign: the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.39). Jonah disappeared into the belly of the whale – and then came out alive, three days later. That, said Jesus, was the ‘sign’ that would tell his generation what was going on. The other ‘signs’ that Jesus was doing were not negative ones. They were not like the prophetic ‘signs’ to which Amos referred, or indeed like the ‘signs’ that Moses and Aaron performed in Egypt to try to shake Pharaoh out of his complacency and allow the Israelites to go free. Those ‘signs’ were strange warning signals: plagues of frogs, or locusts, or rivers turning into blood. Jesus’ ‘signs’ (John gives us a neat catalogue of them) were all about new creation: water into wine, healings, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, life for the dead. The other Gospels chip in with several more, including parties with all the wrong kind of people, indicating a future full of forgiveness. All these were forward-looking signs, declaring the new thing that God was doing. Was doing now.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“The answer is that God does send thunderbolts – human ones. He sends in the poor in Spirit, the meek, the mourners, the peacemakers, the hungry-for-justice people. They are the way God wants to act in his world. They are more effective than any lightning flashes or actual thunderbolts. They will use their initiative; they will see where the real needs are, and go to meet them. They will weep at the tombs of their friends. At the tombs of their enemies. Some of them will get hurt. Some may be killed. That is the story of Acts, all through. There will be problems, punishments, setbacks, shipwrecks, but God’s purpose will come through. These people, prayerful, humble, faithful, will be the answer, not to the question Why? But to the question What? What needs to be done here? Who is most at risk? How can we help? Who shall we send? God works in all things with and through those who love him.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“Prayer is the courageous act of bringing our authentic desires before God. Prayer is the place where, in Jesus’ name, we meet a holy God with all of our humanity hanging out. In our bravest moments of unscripted, unedited prayer, we find ourselves telling God what we want, how we’re afraid to want this, how we fear he’ll withhold, how we fail to trust and to worship and to reverence. We allow ourselves to see—and be seen. In this struggle, prayerful and raw, we willingly wait for the mercies of God to deliver us into the abiding belief that he is good. Prayer, bold and beautiful and brave, takes on the quality of our struggle to surrender to the God who is holy, to the God whose holiness produces our surprise. This kind of prayer is courageous because as we pray, we enter the throne room of God, just as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6. As happened to Isaiah, one glimpse of holiness can produce knee-knocking terror. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (v. 5). The threads of Isaiah’s humanity unravel and fall into a clumsy, ugly heap. Standing painfully aware of the gap lying between human and holy, his own reflection in the mirror undoes him. This is the double vision of prayer: we see God and we see ourselves.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Alongside this Israel-and-God story there runs the deeper story of the good creation and the dark power that from the start has tried to destroy God’s good handiwork. I do not claim to understand that dark power. As I shall suggest later, I don’t think we’re meant to. We are simply to know that when we are caught up in awful circumstances, apparent gross injustices, terrible plagues – or when we are accused of wicked things of which we are innocent, suffering strange sicknesses with no apparent reason, let alone cure – at those points we are to lament, we are to complain, we are to state the case, and leave it with God. God himself declares at the end that Job has told the truth (42.8). He has clung on to the fact that God is just, even though his own misery seems to deny it. Jesus not only drew on that story. He lived it. He died under it. That brings us, then, to the story of Jesus himself.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath