Ella McKinlay

“It is difficult to recapture… the incongruity of a person self-designated as Son of Man, hanging pierced and bleeding on a cross. The incongruity is … even more offensive when this Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees. Jesus juxtaposed the most glorious title available to him [the Son of Man] with the most menial of lifestyles in the culture. He talked like a King and acted like a slave…

He was, in fact, Son of Man ‘given dominion and glory and kingdom’, he was, in fact, completely at home in the ordinary, the everyday, the common. He did not give an inch in either direction: he was very God, very man.

(Reversed Thunder)”
― Eugene Peterson

“The first thing that we realize from the Psalms is that in prayer anything goes. Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death. Nothing human is excluded. The Psalms are an extended refutation that prayer is being ‘nice’ before God. Not at all–it is an offering of ourselves, just as we are.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“We must not overlook the connection between faith and love. The woman saw Jesus and recognised who he was and who dwelt in him. That Vision was her faith. She knew he was forgiving and accepting her before he ever said, “Your sins are forgiven.” She knew because she had seen a goodness in him that could only be God, and it broke her heart with gratitude and love.

Speaking in the language of today, we would say she went “nuts” about Jesus. Her behavior obviously was the behavior of a “nutty” person. (We really do have to use colloquial language to capture responses to Jesus. More formal, literary, or theological language cannot do it.) When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him.”⠀”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“The saint isn’t someone who makes us think, ‘That looks hard; that’s a heroic achievement of will’ - with the inevitable accompanying thought, ‘That’s too hard for me’ - but someone who makes us think, ‘How astonishing! Human lives can be like that, behaviour like that can look quite natural’ - with perhaps the thought, ‘How can I find what they have?’

(Silence and Honeycakes)”
― Rowan Williams