She has been bleeding for twelve years, unclean by the law’s reckoning. Not immoral. Not faithless. Just bleeding. But the law does not distinguish. Twelve years cut off from the Temple courts, the gathering, the easy belonging most people stop noticing until it disappears. She moves through the crowd until she can reach the fringe of his garment. Just the fringe. From behind. Without being seen.

Jesus stops. He turns.

Before she can explain or apologize, he says: Daughter.

Twelve years. A name she had stopped expecting. Not healed yet. Claimed. Brought inside before anything is fixed.

Your faith has saved you.

Earlier that day, he was inside Matthew’s house. Tax collectors. Sinners. The Pharisees stood outside and watched. Jesus stayed at the table.

The professional mourners are already at the ruler’s house when Jesus arrives. Flutes. Wailing. Everything grief requires. These are people who know death. They know its smell, its weight, and the silence that settles over a room afterward. They have closed enough eyes to understand what comes next, which is nothing. When Jesus says the little girl is not dead but sleeping, they laugh.

It is not cruelty. It is certainty. They have sat with enough bodies to know that death does not reverse. The dead are outside everything. Outside belonging, outside any claim, outside the reach of any hand. This is simply how the world works. They are not wrong to know it. They are only wrong about him.

Jesus puts them outside.

He goes in. He takes her hand.

She stands up.

Maybe you have your own twelve years. Or your own room full of certainty about what does not reverse.

The experts are outside. Inside there is a girl and her father and his hand still holding hers.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Eleven disciples climbed a mountain in Galilee because Jesus told them to. Not because the doubt had cleared or the grief had lifted. They went because there was a mountain and an instruction. Obedience came first.

Matthew calls it worship. He also calls it doubt. Same hillside, same moment, same men.

“Doubted” means not yet arrived. Not gone. Matthew names it and moves on. No explanation. No resolution.

Jesus does not wait for them to sort it out. He comes closer.

Not toward their certainty. Toward their trembling.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go.”

The mission does not rest on their confidence. It rests on his authority. They are not sent because they are ready. They are sent because he is risen.

All authority. All nations. All he commanded. All the days. Grace enough for a world they will fail to master.

He sends them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. A name spoken over them before they could understand it. A grace declared before they could earn it. The ground they were already standing on before they knew to look down.

Matthew opened his Gospel with a promise dropped into the silence before the story began: Emmanuel, God with us. Before strength. Before clarity. Before certainty.

Now the risen Christ speaks it himself to eleven men who are still not entirely sure:

“I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Not because the doubt has vanished. Not because death looks any different.

I am with you always.

Maybe you are still on that mountain. Maybe you are still at that graveside. Some part of you believing. Some part of you still staring.

I am with you always.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Every autumn Jerusalem filled with thousands sleeping in shelters of palm and willow, to remember the wilderness, to remember how God kept them alive when there was nothing but sand and sky and the long walking. And every morning of the feast a priest descended to the pool of Siloam, drew water into a golden pitcher, and carried it back through the city in procession, through the crowds, through the gate, up the altar ramp, and poured it out at the base of the altar while the people sang: With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

This is what Israel does with thirst. They carry it to the altar. They pour it out and wait.

You know what you do with yours. You have carried it for years. Not always knowing what to call it. The thing underneath the accomplishment that the accomplishment never quite touched. The restlessness that survives the vacation. The drink that helps until it doesn’t. The relationship that was supposed to be the answer. The achievement that arrived and left the wanting exactly where it was.

Some nights it is the feeling that your life is happening just to the side of you. That the real thing is always about to arrive.

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stands in the middle of all of it and cries out:

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

He does not ask whether you are thirsty. He already knows. The thirst is the given. The invitation is the news.

From within him, he says: rivers of living water, from within him. He is where the rivers begin.

They do not yet know what it will cost for the rivers to run.

John steps in with a note that is the hinge on which everything turns: the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. Not yet. The promise was real. The conditions were not. Something had to happen first. Something that looked like the opposite of rivers. A cross. A spear. A body going still.

On the day soldiers drive a spear into Jesus’ side, water and blood pour out. That is not incidental. That is the feast arriving. The belly of God, opened, and the rivers running.

“Glorified” is John’s word for the whole of it: cross, tomb, morning. What the glorification releases is the Spirit.

For eight mornings the priest climbed the ramp carrying water. Pentecost is the morning the water came down.

Not wind and fire as spectacle. The feast arriving from the other direction. The not-yet, finished.

The rivers are not coming. They are here.

Not a trickle. Not something to manage on. Not grace measured out in careful spoonfuls. Rivers. The kind that cut through desert. The kind that carry life into every dry place they touch.

You do not have to climb the ramp. You know the one. The ramp of being enough. Of earning your place. Of becoming, finally, the version of yourself that deserves to drink. Most days you cannot tell whether you are making progress or simply getting better at looking like you are.

You do not have to carry it to the altar and pour it out and wait.

The invitation came before you arrived. The river broke open before you were thirsty.

If anyone thirsts — let him come to me and drink.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Not a warning. Not a command. Not a rebuke for all they had misunderstood or failed to do. Not even one more explanation, though there was still so much they could not yet grasp.

Jesus lifted his hands and blessed them.

That is how Luke’s Gospel ends.

The disciples had seen those hands do many things. They had seen them touch the sick, welcome children, break bread, and reach toward the unclean. They had seen those hands bound, pierced, and hanging. They had seen them, somehow, alive again.

And now those same hands are raised over them.

The Ascension looks like departure. A strange vanishing. The end of his nearness.

What looks like departure is really the widening of his blessing.

Jesus does not withdraw from his disciples in disappointment. He does not leave them with a burden they must carry alone. He does not ascend with his back turned toward them. He departs with his hands raised in blessing.

Before they preach, they are blessed.
Before they understand the full shape of their mission, they are blessed.
Before they are clothed with power from on high, they are blessed.
Before they do anything for him, his hands are lifted over them.

That matters because most of us live as if blessing comes only after demand. We wake beneath the weight of what must be done, repaired, endured, or held together. We assume that blessing comes afterward, if it comes at all. After we have proven ourselves. After we have become faithful enough, strong enough, useful enough.

But the risen Christ raises his hands over people who had fled, doubted, misunderstood, and grieved. He blesses them not because they are ready, but because he is gracious. Not because they have finally become worthy, but because he has joined himself to them forever. Not because they know how to follow him, but because he refuses to let them go.

And the hands raised over them are still human hands.

Jesus does not shed our humanity like a garment he no longer needs. The Son of God carries our flesh into the life of God.

Our nature is not discarded. Our wounds are not foreign to heaven.

The one who blesses from the right hand of the Father is the same Jesus who walked the road, ate the meal, touched the suffering, wept at the tomb, and showed his scars. He is not less human now. He is humanity healed, humanity glorified, humanity at home.

That is why the disciples return to Jerusalem with great joy.

Not because they have lost him. Not because they understand everything. Not because the world has suddenly become safe. Jerusalem is still Jerusalem. Their mission will not be easy.

But at the right hand of God, there is not a stranger. There is Jesus.

In heaven itself, there is a human life, crucified and risen.

And the hands that were raised over them in blessing have not come down.

Over the church, over the world, over every frightened and unfinished life, his wounded hands remain raised in blessing.

So the Christian life begins where the church begins. Not with our grasp on him, but with his mercy over us. Not with our ability to ascend, but with the astonishing news that he has ascended for us.

The last thing they saw was blessing.

And you are standing under those hands now.

Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things: Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Collect for Ascension Day (1929 Scottish Prayer Book; 1979 BCP)

GRAUNTE we beseche thee, almightie god, that like as we doe beleve thy onely-begotten sonne our lorde to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascende, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the holy Ghost, one God world without end. Amen.

Thomas Cranmer’s Collect for Ascension Day (edited from its 8th century form)

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Not merely lonely. Not merely without company. But abandoned in the deepest sense. Left to carry our grief, our guilt, our future, and ourselves without anyone coming for us.

That is the fear Jesus speaks into on the night before his death.

The disciples do not yet understand what is about to happen. But they know something is wrong. Judas has gone out into the night. Peter’s denial is coming. Jesus has told them he is going away. The room is heavy with dread, and his words do not make the dread vanish.

He has just told them to love one another as he has loved them. At first that sounds like one more burden placed on already-troubled hearts. As if he were saying: When I am gone, prove it. Hold it together. Be faithful enough. Do not fail me.

But that is not what he is doing.

The love he commands is the love he has already lived: love that kneels with a towel, love that stays at the table with betrayers, love that keeps moving toward the ones who will not hold on to him. He is not setting a standard. He is making a gift.

And then he tells them he is leaving.

And that they will not be left.

The Spirit is not a substitute. Not a lesser arrangement made because nothing better was possible. The Spirit is the way Jesus comes nearer than before. Until now he has been with them. Soon, by the Spirit, he will be in them.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”

An orphan had no advocate. No inheritance. No home. Jesus is promising all of it.

That is the heart of it. He does not tell them the next hours will be easy. He tells them they will not be abandoned.

He is not promising help from a distance. He is promising a life joined to his own. The disciples in that room did not yet know how to hold such a promise.

But the promise holds.

There are seasons when Christ feels absent. When prayer seems to vanish into the ceiling. When the room grows dark.

But absence is not the same as abandonment.

The Spirit bears witness to the presence we cannot always feel. Christ comes to us not always as immediate relief, but as the One who refuses to let us go.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“I will not leave you orphaned.”

That is not a command to feel less afraid. It is a promise spoken into fear.

You are not left to save yourself. You are not left to keep yourself faithful. You are not left to manufacture the presence of God.

The Father gives the Spirit. The Son comes to his own. The life of God makes its home in the afraid.

“I will love him and reveal myself to him.”

Not to the world as spectacle. But to frightened people around a table.

This is still how he comes. To ordinary rooms. To troubled hearts. To those who fear they have been left alone.

Not always with explanation. Not always with relief.

But with himself.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John’s Sermon Podcast

“Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

It’s what troubled hearts ask for. Not because they’re faithless, but because they’re afraid. When the future goes dark, subtlety feels cruel. We want God to become unmistakable.

The disciples are in that place. Judas has gone out into the night. Peter’s denial is coming. Jesus has told them he is going away. The room is full of dread, and into that dread Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

But troubled hearts are not easily quieted. They want to know whether mercy will hold.

That is the fear beneath Philip’s request.

“Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

It sounds like devotion. In one sense, it is. To want to see God is no small thing. It is the ache beneath so much of our praying: somewhere, there is a face we were made to behold.

But Philip says this to Jesus.

That is what makes the request so revealing.

He is not standing at a distance from God. He is standing before the Word made flesh. He has watched water become wine. He has seen bread multiply in hungry hands. He has seen blind eyes opened, the dead called from the tomb, and the Lord of heaven kneel on the floor with a towel around his waist.

And still he says, “Show us the Father.”

There is something painfully familiar about that. We can be surrounded by the mercy of God and still ask for some other proof, still half-convinced that somewhere behind the kindness, a harder truth is waiting.

Many of us believe in Jesus, but suspect the Father.

We trust Christ to be kind but imagine God keeping the real account. We see Jesus touching lepers, eating with sinners, bearing shame. And somewhere the fear remains: behind the mercy of the Son, there is a truer, harder deity waiting to be appeased.

Philip’s request is so familiar because it is not always a cry for more faith. Sometimes it is asking whether Jesus has told us the truth about God.

Jesus’ answer is tender, but it wounds the illusion.

“Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”

All this time.

That is the heartbreak in the sentence. All this time, Philip has been looking at the Father and asking when God will appear.

Then comes the claim:

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

There is no God behind the back of Jesus.

No secret face concealed behind his compassion. No deeper truth contradicting his mercy. The Father is not waiting behind the Son to correct his kindness. The Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father. In Jesus, the eternal heart of God has come near enough to touch.

This does not make God smaller. It makes him more wondrous than we dared to believe.

The glory of God is not found by looking past Jesus to something more obviously divine. The glory of God is Jesus himself: washing feet, welcoming the ashamed, going to the cross not because the Father must be convinced to love us, but because the Father has loved us from before the foundation of the world.

This is not one face God wears for a moment. This is what God is like.

So when Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he is not offering a technique for staying calm. He is telling us where to rest our eyes when every lesser certainty falls apart: on the Son who is not hiding the Father from us, but showing him to us.

We do not need to climb behind Jesus to find the real God.

In Jesus, the Father has not hidden his face.

He has shown it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Then Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.”

It is one of the tenderest images in the Gospels. But here it is not soft. It comes in the wake of rejection.

A man has been healed, and then he has been cast out. The miracle does not lead to rejoicing but expulsion. The ones who should have recognized the work of God are the very ones who drive the healed man into the street. He has been healed, and he has been cast out, and it is there, in the street, that Jesus comes looking.

And then Jesus finds him.

This is the setting of the passage. Jesus speaks of sheep and shepherds because the shepherds of Israel have just failed. The ones entrusted with the flock have wounded one of the sheep. The ones charged with tending the people of God have used their authority to shut someone out.

And Jesus has gone after the one they rejected.

Most of us know what it is to live before an invisible tribunal. To manage ourselves carefully, to keep presenting the version of ourselves most likely to be received, to feel the low-grade dread that if we were more fully seen we might be found wanting. However it got there — from the world, from our families, sometimes from the church — it runs deep. We do not only fear suffering. We fear being left outside love.

There are voices that take more than they give. Voices that feed on fear. Voices that leave us more anxious, more vain, more defensive, more alone. Some come from the world. Some from religion. Some from somewhere so deep within us that they feel like our own thoughts.

But Christ’s voice is different.

It does not flatter us, but neither does it crush us. It tells the truth, but as the truth spoken by the one who means to save us. It does not drive us deeper into ourselves. It leads us out.

Jesus says the shepherd calls his own sheep and leads them out. He does not stand at a distance barking orders. He does not coerce. He does not terrify. He goes ahead of them.

And the sheep follow, not because they understand everything, but because they know his voice.

That feels true to the Christian life. Faith is often less like solving a puzzle than hearing your name in the dark. Less like climbing your way to clarity than discovering, sometimes only afterward, that Christ has already laid hold of you. We imagine that the spiritual life begins when we finally get hold of Jesus. John says it begins earlier than that. It begins with Jesus speaking, Jesus calling, Jesus making himself known. Before we can explain him, his voice is already doing its work on us.

“I am the gate.”

Not the wall. The gate.

The man in chapter 9 has just been put out. Now Jesus speaks of entry, safety, pasture, freedom: “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” Jesus does not merely notice the excluded. He comes for them. He brings them in.

Grace is not only that we are forgiven. Grace is that we are brought in.

And this, Jesus says, is life. Not mere survival. Not a spiritualized version of coping. Life abundantly.

Which means not a life scrubbed clean of grief, confusion, or loss. John will not let us say anything so thin. It means a life freed from the frantic need to keep saving ourselves — from the labor of proving, securing, justifying, protecting. It means being known without being discarded, led without being driven, kept without being abandoned. Abundant life is not the absence of wounds. It is life with the Shepherd in the midst of them.

And yet many of the voices we trust most do not love us. They promise seriousness, control, righteousness, vindication. But they leave us smaller. Narrower. Harder. Less alive.

But there is another voice.

The Shepherd’s.

Even now, in all the noise, he is still speaking.

And his voice is life.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

It is hard to imagine a sadder sentence.

Not because hope is gone. Because it has slipped into the past tense.

We had hoped. We thought this was it. We thought God was doing something here. We thought Jesus was the one.

Luke finds them on the road to Emmaus, walking away from Jerusalem. Away from the city. Away from the tomb. Away from the place where hope had been crucified.

That is what disappointment does sometimes. It does not collapse in a heap. It just starts walking.

And while they are talking and arguing and trying to make sense of the wreckage, Jesus himself comes near and goes with them.

Not after they turn around. Not after they believe. Now. While they are leaving.

Their eyes are kept from recognizing him. So the risen Christ walks beside them as a stranger. He listens while they tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, mighty in word and deed. He listens while they recount the cross, the burial, the women, the empty tomb, the confusion.

He listens while they tell Jesus what happened to Jesus.

I know that way of telling it. You go over the facts you can see. You name what ended. You say what God did not do. You talk until the wound becomes the whole story.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

More than grief. There is a particular shame in a collapsed hope—the mortification of having thanked God for something that turned to rubble, of having said aloud, I really thought this was from him.

So Jesus tells the story again.

He begins at the beginning. Moses. The prophets. All of it moving toward this. He shows them that the Messiah had to suffer before entering glory.

The cross was not the collapse of the story, but the place where the story was doing its deepest work.

They had hoped for redemption. They were right to hope. They were only wrong about the way it would come.

Later they will say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” At the time, all they know is that something in them is warming. Something is catching under the ash.

Then they reach the village.

Jesus walks ahead as though he were going on. And they urge him, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”

Stay with us.

Evening is coming. The road has been long. Nothing is clear. Stay.

And he does.

At the table he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.

Then their eyes are opened.

Then they know him.

Then he is gone.

Known in the breaking. Gone in the knowing.

It is enough. Enough to turn their feet around. Enough to send them back into the dark.

That same hour they go back to Jerusalem. Back to the city they had left. Back to the others. Back to the bewildered company learning how to say what sounds impossible: “The Lord has risen indeed.”

“We had hoped.”

Yes.

Some of us know that sentence by heart.

And still he comes near.

Before they knew him, he was with them. Before they understood, he was teaching them. Before they turned around, he had already turned toward them.

He meets us on the wrong road.

They asked him to stay. He already had.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

He is asking for what the others already received. They saw the Lord. They saw his hands and his side. They heard his voice in the room. Thomas is not worse than the rest. He simply cannot live on their seeing. He cannot live forever on borrowed joy. He wants the living Christ for himself.

And that is where John meets us too.

Because that is the ache, isn’t it? Not just to hear that Christ is risen. Not just to repeat what the church has said. Not just to admire the faith of people who seem to have known him more vividly than we do. But to know him. To be able to say, not because someone else said it first, but because something in you has been met: My Lord and my God.

John says the disciples are behind locked doors.

Fear has sealed the room.

That is where the church begins. Not in courage. Not in clarity. Not with people who have already become Easter people. It begins with frightened disciples trying to keep the world outside.

And Jesus comes anyway.

He does not wait for the door to open. He does not wait for their fear to become faith. He comes into the room as it is, into the fear as it is, into the shut little world they have made for themselves now that everything has gone wrong.

And the first thing he says is this:

Peace be with you.

Not rebuke.
Not shame.
Peace.

Then he shows them his hands and his side.

The wounds are still there.

John will not let us have a resurrection that floats free from crucifixion. The risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus. Easter has not erased Good Friday. He is alive, but not untouched. The wounds remain, not as proof that death won, but as proof that he has gone all the way into our ruin and come through the other side.

Then he says it again:

Peace be with you.

And this time he sends them.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

This peace is not for hiding. It is peace for mission. Peace that takes frightened people and sends them back into the world.

Then he breathes on them.

And in John, that breath feels like the world beginning again.

The room is still locked. The fear has not had time to vanish. And yet new creation has already begun. Not out there somewhere, once everyone is healed up and brave. Here. In this room. In these people. In this fear. Christ breathes, and a frightened little band becomes the beginning of the church.

Then Thomas.

He was not there that first evening. And when the others tell him, “We have seen the Lord,” he does not know what to do with a joy he cannot enter. He wants what they had. He wants to see. He wants to touch. He wants not a report, not a slogan, not borrowed certainty. He wants the living Christ.

And Jesus comes back for him too.

A week later: the locked room again, the peace again, the wounds again.

Jesus does not humiliate him. He does not make him stand there in the shame of not being ready. He meets him.

And Thomas says what the whole Gospel has been moving toward from the beginning:

My Lord and my God.

Then Jesus says the line John means for us:

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That can sound like less. As though the first disciples got the real thing and we get what is left over. As though they got presence and we get memory.

But John is saying something better than that.

The age of sight ends.
The age of encounter does not.

We do not get Easter evening as Thomas did. We do not get the visible Christ stepping into the room and holding out wounded hands. We do not get to put our fingers where Thomas wanted to put his.

And that hurts, if we are honest.

We would like that.
We would like something plainer.
We would like to see.

But the risen Christ is not withholding himself from us.

He still comes.

He comes in the witness that tells the truth about him.
He comes in the Word that speaks him now.
He comes in the Spirit breathed from his risen life.

So perhaps this is where the passage finds us: behind our own locked doors.

The room you have made because fear felt wiser.
The room you have made because grief changed the air.
The room you have made because disappointment taught you not to expect too much.
The room you have made because pain stayed long enough to feel permanent.

And into that sealed place Christ still comes.

Not always with the sight we want.
Not always with the proof we would design.
But truly.

He comes speaking peace into the places where fear has had the final word.
He comes still bearing wounds, so that suffering does not get the last word about either him or you.
He comes breathing life into what has gone numb.
He comes sending us out of the rooms where we have only been enduring.

Faith, then, is not pretending. It is not squeezing certainty out of ourselves. It is not trying to be brave enough to deserve him.

It is receiving the risen Christ as he now gives himself.

You do not have to live forever on borrowed joy.

He still comes.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Park Slope Sermon Podcast

Nobody preaches the fear.

I know because I haven’t.

I have preached the joy, and I should have. The tomb is open. The angel blazes like lightning. Christ is risen. The women run with news that changes everything.

But Matthew will not let me preach the joy without the fear.

He says they left the tomb with fear and great joy.

Both.

Not fear first and joy later. Not fear swallowed up by joy before they had taken a single step down the road. Fear and great joy, running alongside each other.

We imagine Easter making everything clear. Settled. Calm. We imagine that if resurrection really became real to us, the trembling would cease. The divided heart would finally heal. Fear would retreat and joy would take over.

But that is not what Matthew says.

Matthew says the first people to carry Easter in their bodies carried it with fear still alive in them. And then Jesus met them on the road and said, “Do not be afraid.”

You do not say that to people who are no longer afraid.

You say it to people whose hearts are still racing. To people who need to know that fear has not placed them outside the reach of the risen Christ.

Because fear is not always the opposite of faith.

Sometimes it is what resurrection feels like when it first arrives.

Before the women even reach the tomb, the ground shakes. An angel descends. The stone is rolled back. The guards—professional soldiers posted there to make sure the finality of what had happened stayed undisturbed—collapse like dead men.

Matthew is not painting a peaceful spring sunrise. He is describing a world coming apart.

Because that is what the resurrection is:

Not a mood.
Not a metaphor.
Not a softer way of saying that life goes on.

It is the collapse of the old world.

The world where death gets the last word.
The world where love is beautiful but fragile.
The world where self-protection looks like wisdom.
The world where the crucified are buried and the powerful remain.

That world begins to crack open on Easter morning.

No wonder they are afraid.

If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then the world is not what we thought it was. Death is not final. Fear is not realism. The powers that looked permanent are already passing away. The crucified one has been vindicated. Love has not lost.

That is joy.

And that is terrifying.

Because if it is true, the resurrection is not only comfort for someday. It is a claim on today. It reaches into the life already being lived. Into habits. Into calculations. Into all the quiet ways a life gets organized around the assumption that death wins.

I know that life from the inside.

The heart kept on a short leash. Love carefully rationed. Forgiveness extended selectively. The guard maintained and called wisdom. The lips saying Christ is risen while the days are quietly arranged around the assumption that death gets the last word after all.

So when Matthew says the women ran with fear and great joy, he is not describing a spiritual failure. He is describing what it feels like when resurrection first breaks into a human life.

Something in us knows this is good.

Something in us knows this changes everything.

And something in us trembles because if it is true, the old life cannot remain intact.

Maybe that is where you are as you read this.

Not in a room full of people where the organ is playing and the lilies are bright.

Alone with a page. Carrying something that has no clean name. A grief that has not loosened its grip. A loss that reshaped the geography of your life and you still haven’t found your footing in the new terrain.

A long, quiet erosion of hope that didn’t announce itself all at once. It just slowly made the world smaller and grayer until you realized one day that you were going through the motions of living without expecting anything to bloom again.

Or maybe it is not grief exactly.

Maybe it is the fear beneath the fear: the suspicion, held quietly for years, that the life you are living is not the life you were made for, and you no longer know how to find your way back.

Maybe it is the exhaustion of someone who has been strong for too long and has nothing left to generate.

Maybe you are not sure you believe any of it anymore.

Hear the gospel.

Jesus does not wait for fearless people. He meets frightened people on the road.

Not after they have mastered themselves. Not after they have found the right words and risen into proper Easter confidence. They ran with fear and great joy, and Jesus met them there.

There.

On the road.
In the middle.
Before the fear was gone.

Fear has many forms. There is the fear of dying, yes. But there is also the fear of loving when love may cost something real. The fear of forgiving when forgiveness feels like exposure. The fear of hoping again after disappointment. The fear that the way of Christ is not noble nonsense, but the grain of the universe.

And beneath all of them is the old assumption: protect yourself, because in the end death wins anyway.

Easter shatters that assumption.

The resurrection does not abolish fear by pretending there is nothing left to fear. The women still live under Rome. The world is still wounded. The cross was still real. The nails still happened.

Easter is not denial.

It is defiance.

It is God’s refusal to let death have the final word. God’s refusal to let fear name reality. God’s declaration that the life and love of Jesus are not a beautiful failure, but the deepest truth of all things.

And because he is alive, fear is no longer final.

Real, yes.
Powerful, yes.
Final, no.

That is why Jesus says, “Do not be afraid,” not because nothing frightening remains, but because he has gone through death and come out the other side. Because from that morning on, fear never again gets to speak last.

Fear does not disqualify. Grief does not disqualify. Exhaustion does not disqualify. A divided heart does not disqualify. Whatever you are carrying as you read this, the road under your feet is still a road on which Christ can be met.

The women took hold of his feet and worshiped him. And Jesus said again, “Do not be afraid.”

Again.

Because he is patient with frightened people. Because he is not ashamed to meet us while our hearts are still racing. Because he would rather have trembling disciples on the road than fearless ones who never move.

Do not mistake your fear for the absence of faith.

It may be the place where resurrection is pressing closest.

The women ran with fear and great joy.

And Jesus met them on the road.

Christ is risen.
Do not be afraid.

Hey friends, I’m really happy with how this devotional turned out. But writing it also led to what I think is an even better sermon. That’s part of why I write these. You can find it below:

Easter Day’s Sermon

Jesus cried out and breathed his last. The earth shook. The curtain tore. A spear pierced his side just to be sure.

Joseph wrapped the body in linen. They laid him in a borrowed tomb. A stone sealed the entrance.

And that is where the story rests today.

Jesus is dead.

Not almost dead. Not unconscious. Not hidden. Dead.

For one full day, the Son of God lies in the earth.

The Gospels give us almost nothing about this day. No miracle. No sermon. No angel. Just silence.

The disciples are scattered. The women keep the Sabbath and wait. The world goes on as it always has.

Rome still rules. Death still reigns. The grave still keeps its dead.

And somewhere outside Jerusalem, in a garden tomb, lies the body of Jesus.

The church confesses something strange here: he descended to the dead.

The incarnation does not stop at the cross. It goes all the way down.

The Son of God does not only share our life. He shares our death.

He enters the silence of the grave. The stillness. The place where breath has stopped, where words have ended, where nothing more can be said.

There is no human depth he will not enter. Not even this one.

This day is not only about his death. It is about the smaller deaths we know already: the future you had imagined, the life you thought you were walking toward, the moment you realize that story is over and the stone is already in place.

And one day, the greater death that waits for all of us.

The church does not rush past this.

That is why this day is holy.

Because even here—in the stillness of the tomb, in the silence where hope seems buried—God has already gone.

Tomorrow the stone will move.

But today we remember: Christ has gone down into the grave before us.

And because he has been there, death is no longer godforsaken ground.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

There is a charcoal fire in the courtyard. It is cold, and you are standing at it, warming your hands, keeping your distance from the door. Close enough to see what is happening. Far enough to stay out of it.

Someone looks at you across the fire.
You are not one of his disciples, are you?

And something in you goes quiet.

I have said versions of it my whole life. Not in a courtyard. Not with a rooster waiting. But when I saw what it would cost and chose the easier thing. When I kept my distance. When I stopped going to the places where he might find me.

I do not know him.
I do not know him.
I am not one of them.

And then the rooster.
And then the silence.

You are standing in the cold with the words still on your lips, and you cannot take them back.

This is where you are when they lead him out.
Not at the foot of the cross.
Not with the ones who stayed.
Here. At the fire. In the cold. In the thing you cannot undo.

And he goes.
For you.
Knowing what you just said.
Knowing what you will say again.
Knowing what you carried here today.
Knowing what you have never told anyone.
Knowing everything you are not and may never be.

He goes anyway.
All the way to the cross.
All the way to the end.

And then one word.

Tetelestai.

He bows his head and gives up his spirit.

Not after the stone is rolled away.
Here.
In the dark.
While he is still on the cross.

It crosses the dark.
It finds you at the fire, in the middle of the thing you cannot undo.

Not after you have made it right.
Not after you have wept enough.
Not after you have become someone better.

Here.
While the guilt is still loud.
While the grief is still heavy.
While the words are still hanging in the air.

He was finishing that.
On the cross.
In the dark.
Before you could see it.
Before you could help it.
Before you even turned around.

Tetelestai.
It is finished.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

That is where John begins. Not with the basin. Not with the towel. With what Jesus knows before he stands up from the table.

He knows Judas.

Not just his name. Not just the man across the table. He knows what Judas has already decided. What he will do before morning. The price he has already agreed to. Jesus has known it long enough that John does not treat it as a surprise, only a fact in the room, sitting among them like a thirteenth guest, quiet and inevitable.

He knows Peter.

Not the Peter speaking now. The Peter who will stand outside in the cold a few hours from now and say three times to three different people that he has never heard of him. Jesus knows that Peter. He can already see the firelight on his face.

He knows the others too. That they will fade. That they will find reasons to be elsewhere when the cost becomes real. Not villains. Not enemies. Just men who love him and will not be able to stay.

He knows all of it.

This is the man who stands up from the table. Takes off his outer robe. Ties a towel around his waist. Pours water into a basin. And kneels.

Not in spite of what he knows. With it.

He holds all of it.

And lifts the first foot.

He comes to Peter.

Peter looks down and recoils. The whole order of the world gives way at once. The Lord at his feet. The master kneeling. The Holy One doing the work of a servant.

You will never wash my feet.

He means it as loyalty. It is loyalty. The only kind he knows.

Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.

Peter does not understand it. But he understands this much: he cannot bear to be without him. If he is to remain with Jesus, he will have to let Jesus wash him.

Not my feet only but also my hands and my head.

Jesus does not ask Peter to do more. He asks Peter to stop. And let him.

Peter does.

And he goes on.

Every foot.

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Then he puts his robe back on. He returns to the table. Sits back down among them. The betrayer. The denier. The ones who will run. He knows what is coming for every one of them. They are still finishing their bread.

Do you know what I have done to you?

They do not. Not yet.

Love one another as I have loved you.

As I have loved you.

What he does in the upper room with water he will do on the hill with blood. For the same men. Knowing the same things.

The basin was more than a lesson.
It was a preview.

We are in that room.

He is making his way toward us with a basin and a towel, and he already knows everything. Not the version of us we have managed to arrange and present. The whole of it.

He saw it before he stood up.

He stood up anyway.

He does not ask for your strength.
He does not ask for your composure.
He asks for what you would rather hide.

Do not hurry to become worthy.

Let him wash you.

Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.

He is already kneeling.1

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

That is Matthew’s word. Not stirred. Not buzzing. The Greek is seismos, earthquake. The whole city of Jerusalem shudders when he enters it.

Matthew will use that word two more times.

When Jesus dies, the earth shakes and the curtain tears.
When Jesus rises, the guards shake and fall like dead men.
It is the same word each time.

The entry.
The cross.
The resurrection.

One long earthquake.

It begins here.

With a crowd that does not know it has already started.

There is a man in that crowd.

We do not know his name. We know what he is carrying: a branch in his hand and a picture in his mind.

The picture is specific.

The occupiers gone.
The city free.
His children growing up in a country that belongs to them again.

He has prayed this so many times the words have worn smooth.
He knows exactly what salvation looks like.

And then he sees the animal.

A donkey.

Borrowed. Small. The animal of a man with nowhere urgent to be.

And the man on it.

He is not looking at the crowd. He is not performing arrival. His eyes are fixed somewhere past the gate, past the noise, past everything the crowd is shouting for. He looks like a man who has already seen where this road ends and has come anyway.

The man with the branch doesn’t know what to do with that.

So he does what he knows.

He shouts.

Hosanna to the Son of David.

Save us.

A plea dressed like celebration.

He means every syllable. The need is real. The waiting has been real.

But the donkey.
But those eyes.

Kings do not ride donkeys.
Kings arrive after victories, with force behind them, with the sound of something already won.

This man comes with dust on his feet and a borrowed animal and his gaze fixed on something no one else in the crowd can see.

The city shakes when he enters.

The man with the branch feels it.

He thinks it means arrival.
He is right.
He just does not know yet what is arriving.

For a day or two, the shouting is enough.

He drops the branch somewhere in the middle of the week.

He doesn’t remember exactly when. Only that at some point the hope became heavier than he could carry, so he set it down and went home.

He is at home when the earth shakes the second time.

Same word.
Same ground moving beneath his feet.

Somewhere outside the city walls a man is dying.

The man on the donkey.

By evening it looks like the story is over.

He feels the shaking but does not know what it means. He only knows it is connected somehow to that road. To the man on the donkey. To the thing he shouted and stopped believing.

So he goes to find out what happened.

And the story he hears is not possible.

The tomb is open.

The man on the donkey.
The one who came on the wrong animal.
The one whose eyes were fixed on something no one else could see.
The one he had already finished with.

He is alive.

The branch is still lying on the road where he left it.

He doesn’t go back for it.

He doesn’t need it anymore.

What he shouted was true.

He just did not know yet what he was asking for.
What it would cost.
What it would look like when the answer finally came.

You know what it is to drop the branch.

Not a dramatic moment.
Just a quiet one somewhere in the middle of your own week.

The prayer started out full and somewhere along the way it got heavier than your hope could hold. So you set it down. You didn’t announce it. You just stopped carrying it.

And you went home.

The door that didn’t open.
The body that didn’t heal.
The person who didn’t come back.
The silence where the answer was supposed to be.

You can still feel it, can’t you?

The weight of what you put down.
The shape of what you stopped believing.

The earth shook when he entered the city.
It shook again when he died.
And when the tomb opened, the shaking was not finished.

The ground is still moving.

The one you asked to save you is not where they put him.

And the first road he walks
is the one where the branch was dropped.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

“The one you love is sick.” And Jesus stays where he is. John does not soften it. He tells us plainly that Jesus loved them, loved Martha, loved her sister, loved Lazarus. So he stayed two days longer.

Love and delay in the same sentence.

Most of us know that sentence. We have sent word. We have prayed the simple prayer. The one you love is sick. And the one who could come does not come. The marriage. The body. The child. The quiet unraveling we cannot stop. And he is not here.

By the time Jesus arrives, the situation is not fragile. It is final. Four days in the tomb. Long enough that hope has shifted from rescue to remembrance.

“Lord, if you had been here…”

They both say it. Not rebellion. Not unbelief. Just grief sharpened into geography. If you had been here.

The sentence is spoken to him. Faith does not avoid its disappointment; it tells him exactly where he was not.

He does not explain the two days. He does not defend his absence. He asks a different question.

“Where have you laid him?”

Where.

Take me there.

When he sees Mary weeping, and the others weeping with her, something in him rises. John’s word is not gentle. It suggests agitation, a deep stirring, the kind of force that gathers before a charge. He is shaken. Not confused. Not helpless. Shaken.

This is not quiet empathy. This is love refusing to remain outside what it loves.

Death stands there like an intruder in his Father’s world. You can see it on their faces. Hear it in their voices. Smell it behind the stone. The tomb is not home. The tears are not how things were meant to be. And the Son of God does not stand back and study the wreckage.

Jesus weeps.

Not because he does not know what he will do. Not because Lazarus is permanently lost. He weeps because he is here. Because grief is here. Because love does not hover above the damage.

Then he steps toward the stone.

“Take it away.”

Martha hesitates. “Lord, by this time there will be an odor.” She has just confessed him as the Christ, the Son of God. And now she is talking about the smell. That is not failure. That is what it means to believe while standing in front of decomposition. Creed in the mouth, decay in the air.

And there, in front of the sealed grave, he says something that should not yet make sense:

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

Not I will be. Not I will bring. I am.

It does not look credible. He is standing in front of a stone that has not yet moved. Resurrection sounds like something safely placed at the end of time. But he relocates it.

Not there. Here.
Not then. Me.

He calls into the darkness: “Lazarus, come out.”

And death yields.

The man walks out, still wrapped, still marked by where he has been. The grave does not release him cleanly. They have to unbind him. Resurrection still carries the smell of where he was.

Some believe. Some go and tell.

And from that day on, they decide Jesus must die.

If Lazarus walks out of the grave, someone else will walk into one. Caiaphas will say it bluntly: it is better that one man die for the people. He does not know how right he is.

At the cross, he goes where no one else can stand.

Lazarus breathes. Jesus does not.

The one who called into the darkness is swallowed by it. The voice that said, “Come out,” goes silent. He is laid where the dead are laid.

The body is wrapped.

The stone is sealed.

No voice calls him back.

The Resurrection lies still.

Dead men stay dead.

But the Father does not leave him there.

On the third day, the silence breaks. The stone moves. The one who entered the grave walks out of it.

He did not stay there. He was there.

And there is no place left for you to stand where he has not already stood.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

To be invisible, he has learned, you do not need to be blind. You only need to be inconvenient.

And then someone stops. Not to question him. Not even to speak to him, not yet. Just to stop. To see him.

Jesus makes mud. Presses it to his eyes. Says go wash.

And he goes.

And the world opens.
And then the world closes.

He has barely had time to see it.

Not all at once. Slowly. Question by question.

Is this the same man?

He has to stand there and argue for his own existence to people who only know where to place him when he is blind.

You were the blind man.
We knew the blind man.
Who are you now?

He tells them what happened.

A man put mud on my eyes.
I washed.
I see.

That is all he knows. It is enough. It is not enough for them.

They are not looking for the truth. They are looking for a way to make the truth not count. They circle it. They question the source, the timing, the man who did it. They send for his parents. They call him back. They start again.

And something happens in him that no one expected.

He does not shrink.
He grows.

Not because he has more answers. Because he has one answer they cannot take from him.

Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know.

I was blind and now I see.

They cannot move him. So they go looking for someone who can.

They go to his parents.

His parents, who knew exactly what this day meant for their son.

And fear spoke first.

He is of age. Ask him.

Four words that leave their son standing alone in the room.

He has his sight.
He has the truth.
He has nothing else.

They throw him out.

He is outside now.

That is not a location. It is a condition.

He has told the truth about the most important thing that ever happened to him, and it has cost him the only world he knew.

He gained his sight and lost his world in the same day.

There is an outside you do not choose. It is where you end up when telling the truth costs more than you thought it would. When the people who were supposed to stay do not. When you did nothing wrong and lost everything anyway.

You know the place. You may be there now.

The fear is not just being cast out. It is that outside is final. That the door closing is the last thing that happens. That what the room decided about you is what you are.

And he cannot go looking for Jesus. He wouldn’t recognize his face. He has never seen it. He only knows what was done to him. He doesn’t know where Jesus went.

He only knows where he is.

Outside.

And then Jesus finds him.

Not the other way around.

Jesus hears what happened. And he comes. Not to the synagogue. Not to the people debating his identity inside. He goes to where they put the man they couldn’t answer.

And for a moment they are just two people standing there. One who was cast out. One who came looking.

This is the moment.

Not the healing. This.

Do you believe in the Son of Man?

Who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe.

You have seen him. It is the one speaking to you now.

The first face he truly sees is not a neighbor. Not a Pharisee. Not someone who looked away.

It is the one who saw him first.

Lord, I believe.

And he worships.

And something opens that no one can close.

He was found outside.
He was known outside.
He worshiped outside.

Outside was not where his life ended. It was where Jesus was.

You know where you are. He does too.

He goes to where they put you.

And he finds you there.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

No miracles. No parables. Just the Word made flesh, worn out from walking, sitting at a well in the heat of the day.

And then a woman comes. At noon. Alone.

She has learned not to expect people to stay.

He asks her for a drink. It shouldn’t happen. She names it. Jew, Samaritan, man, woman. All the lines that keep people where they belong. And still he stays.

“If you knew who was speaking to you,” he says, “you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

She hears water. He is talking about life. He is not offering advice. He is offering himself.

She doesn’t understand. But she doesn’t leave.

And then he says it. Five husbands. The man you are with now. No explanation from her. No defense. Just her life, spoken out loud by someone who was not there for any of it.

Will he stay now?

You know what it is to be seen and then left.

She has no answer for it. Neither do we. We only know what usually happens. Distance. Silence. A conversation that ends a few sentences too soon. But she doesn’t leave. And he doesn’t send her away.

He stays. As if nothing he has said has changed his desire to be there. As if being known is not the end of the story.

He keeps talking. About water. About life. About a God who is not waiting to be found in the right place, but who came and sat down at this one.

And then he says it.

“I am he.”

Not in the temple. Not to the qualified. Here. To her. The one who came at noon. The one who has nothing left to explain.

The one whose life can be said in a sentence.

She leaves her jar. The reason she came. As if it is no longer what she needs.

And she goes back. To the people she came at noon to avoid. Not with answers. Just this:

“Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.”

Everything. And he did not leave.

That is enough. Enough to send her back. Enough to draw others out. Enough to begin something she cannot yet name.

This is what he offers: to be known, fully, without having to explain yourself first.

Here, in the middle of the day. With nothing hidden.

He stays.

There is nothing in her life that made him leave. There is nothing in yours.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

He’s a teacher of Israel. A serious one. He knows the Scriptures. He knows the tradition. He knows how faith works, or at least how it has always worked for him.

And still, something in Jesus unsettles him enough to come quietly, after hours, when no one is watching.

Jesus doesn’t flatter him. He doesn’t affirm his curiosity. He doesn’t say, “You’re almost there.”

He goes straight for the heart.

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Not improved.
Not instructed.
Not more disciplined.

Born.

Which means this is not something you do.
It’s something that happens to you.

Nicodemus is confused. He hears Jesus in the only categories he has: effort, process, achievement. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” In other words, how does this work? What’s the method?

Jesus doesn’t answer the question.
He undoes it.

What is born of flesh is flesh.
What is born of Spirit is spirit.

Nicodemus is sincere. But this is something else.

Even good, faithful religion tends to assume continuity, a straight line from who I am now to who I will become if I try hard enough, believe deeply enough, get it right often enough.

Jesus interrupts that story.

The life God gives doesn’t evolve from what we already have.
It comes from above.

So Jesus turns to images: birth, wind, flesh and Spirit. Things you cannot force. Things you cannot organize into a system. The wind moves and leaves its effects behind. You hear it before you understand it. You feel it without managing it.

So it is with the Spirit.

Control slips through our fingers.
Salvation no longer rests on our competence.

Then Jesus takes him back to the wilderness.

There, the people were dying. Moses lifted up a bronze serpent. And those who looked lived.

They weren’t healed because they understood why it worked.
They weren’t healed because they deserved it.
They were healed because they looked.

“So must the Son of Man be lifted up,” Jesus says.

Not so the world might finally climb up to God,
but so God could reach down into the mess.

This is the scandal.
The kingdom isn’t a ladder.
It’s a lifeline.

“For God so loved the world…”

Not the worthy.
Not the enlightened.
Not the ones who had their theology sorted.

The world.
The whole snake-bitten mess of it.

God does not send the Son to condemn what’s already condemned. He sends the Son to rescue. To give life. To bring light into the night. To birth something entirely new where only death seemed possible.

Nicodemus fades from view after this conversation. We don’t see him decide. We don’t get a clean conversion moment.

But later, he shows up. Quietly defending Jesus before the council. Then again at the burial, bringing seventy-five pounds of spices—extravagant, public, perhaps too late, but still drawn.

We don’t know when the birth happened.
We don’t see the moment the wind blew through his life.

That’s the point.

The Spirit moves where it will. It doesn’t always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it comes slowly. Quietly.
The kind of thing you only recognize looking back.

That is how new life often comes.

New life is not achieved.
It is given.

And like all births, it is less about our strength
and more about our surrender.

Look at the One who has been lifted up.

Look up.
And live.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

Right after the water.
Right after the sky cracks open.
Right after the Father says,
“This is my beloved Son.”

Right after the light, Jesus is thrown into silence. No crowds. No comfort. Just the dry, cracked ache of hunger and a voice that twists the one he just heard.

“If you are the Son of God…”

It’s not doubt. It’s pressure.

Since you’re the Son,
prove it. Use it. Exploit it.

Turn stones into bread.
Force the Father’s hand.
Take the kingdom without the cross.

Each temptation is a shortcut.
And each shortcut makes sense.

Hunger is real. Protection is promised. The world does need saving.

The devil doesn’t tempt Jesus to do evil.
He tempts him to be the wrong kind of good.

That’s what makes temptation work:
it offers something good without the road God actually chose.

Provision without dependence.
Security without surrender.
Glory without obedience.

And Jesus refuses them all.

He doesn’t argue.
He doesn’t perform.
He doesn’t grab.

He remembers.

Not a tactic. Not a spell. Not a strategy.

Three times he answers with Scripture.
Not to weaponize it. To submit to it.

He draws from the wilderness pages of Deuteronomy the memory of a people who forgot.

Where Israel grumbled, Jesus waits.
Where Israel tested, Jesus trusts.
Where Israel bowed, Jesus stays faithful.

He stands where they fell.

Matthew places this moment here.

Before the teaching.
Before the miracles.
Before the cross.

Because this is who Jesus is.

Not just Son by declaration.
Son by obedience.
Son by trust.

And that voice from the desert will echo again.
“If you are the Son of God…”
They’ll shout it from the foot of the cross.
“Come down. Save yourself.”

But again, Jesus will not take the shortcut.
Again, he will trust the Father’s will.
Again, he will let love cost him everything.

This story is not a manual.
It’s a window.

It doesn’t show us how to win in the wilderness.
It shows us the One who already has.

He trusted where we manipulate.
He waited where we rush.
He obeyed where we hedge.
He stood where we collapse.

And he did it for us.

This is the kind of Messiah we follow.
Not the one who grabbed what was his, but the one who emptied himself.

The one who would not turn stones to bread for himself will one day give himself as bread for the world.

Not the one who avoided the cross, but the one who walked straight into it, because love led him there.

If the wilderness is where you are — dry, tested, tempted to make something out of nothing just to get through — hear this:

Jesus has been there.

And he did not leave empty-handed.

He left carrying you.

Join us today at 10 AM at .

We’ll gather, hear a fresh word, and come to the table together.

The storm is expected later in the afternoon, but please use your own judgment. Grace abounds either way.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast

We want our goodness to register somewhere.
To be noticed.
To reassure us that it mattered.

Jesus seems to know this. Which is why, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, right when he’s talking about righteousness, he doesn’t warn us against immorality. He warns us to beware of practicing our righteousness before others in order to be seen by them.

That line lands uncomfortably close to home. Because Jesus isn’t talking about fake religion here. He assumes prayer. He assumes generosity. He assumes fasting. These are not the problem.

The problem is the audience.

Again and again, Jesus contrasts two worlds.
Two economies.
Two reward systems.

In one world, righteousness is public-facing. It circulates through attention, approval, admiration. It can be measured by reputation, credibility, applause. And Jesus is honest about this world. If that’s what you’re after, it works.

They have received their reward.
Paid in full.

This feels especially sharp in our moment. We live in a culture that rewards visibility almost automatically. Moral seriousness is often expressed by being seen taking the right stance, posting the right thing, signaling the right commitments. This happens on the Left and the Right, in activist spaces and religious ones alike.

None of this means justice doesn’t matter.
None of it means public witness is wrong.

But Jesus’ question presses deeper.

What is this for?
Is the goal faithfulness?
Or visibility?
Transformation?
Or recognition?

It’s possible to fight for good things while quietly feeding the same old hunger. The need to be noticed, affirmed, counted among the righteous. Activism can become a kind of spiritual theater. Outrage can substitute for prayer. Being seen on the right side can matter more than actually loving the people in front of us.

It’s possible to build an entire ministry brand around being prophetic, while never examining whether the performance of prophetic witness has become more important than the quiet work of reconciliation. To curate a life that signals depth while avoiding the unglamorous labor of spiritual formation.

And if I’m honest, I know how easy it is to confuse being seen doing good with actually being made good.

Jesus doesn’t dismiss any of this with cynicism.
He simply names the cost.

If righteousness depends on being seen, it will always be anxious. Always reactive. Always hungry for more attention.

So he introduces another way.

When you give, when you pray, when you fast, do it in secret.

Not because secrecy is holier. But because secrecy breaks the spell.

It severs righteousness from the economy of performance. It trains us to act without applause. It teaches us to trust that God’s witness is enough.

Would you still give if no one posted about it?
Would you still pray if no one saw growth?
Would you still fast if no one praised your discipline?

This is not about retreating from the world.
It is about refusing to let the world’s metrics shape our hearts.

That’s where Jesus reframes it all.
Do not store up treasures on earth.

When we give to be seen, we store our treasure in attention.
When we pray to be noticed, we store it in approval.
When we build a life around being recognized, we anchor ourselves in something fragile.

Or we learn to live before God.

Earthly treasure is brittle. It depends on being seen. It fades when attention shifts. It corrodes when the algorithm moves on. It leaves us exhausted, trying to maintain appearances we can’t sustain.

Heavenly treasure is quieter. Slower. Harder to measure.
But it endures, because it is bound to God, not to us.

And at the center of it all is this quiet, repeated word.

Your Father.

Not judge. Not audience. Father.

The righteousness Jesus invites us into isn’t an audition. It isn’t a pitch. It is a response to the stunning claim that God already sees.

Which exposes something tender and true. Much of our spiritual restlessness comes from doing good for reasons it was never meant to bear. From asking our practices to give us identity. From using righteousness to secure ourselves rather than to receive grace.

Jesus offers freedom from all of that.

Where your treasure is, he says, there your heart will be also.

Your heart will always follow your investments. If your treasure is visibility, your heart will remain restless. If your treasure is God, hidden, faithful, already given, your heart will begin, slowly, to rest.

This is not a call to withdraw.
It is a call to live before the right audience.

To practice justice that doesn’t need credit.
To pray without curating the result.
To trust a Father who sees in secret, and whose reward is not applause, but life.

Because the kingdom Jesus announces does not arrive with spectacle.
It grows in hidden soil.
It works in ways we cannot track.
And it frees us, finally, from the exhausting need to be seen.

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:

St. John's Sermon Podcast