Chapter 32
Monday reflections — it’s been quite a long pause …
Each week offers a new reason to fear, a new reason to divide.
But every so often, a story appears that quietly asks:
Have we forgotten the Jesus we claim to follow?
This past week, two very different stories crossed my path.
The first, a BBC report celebrating a young, vibrant man, the first Muslim and African-born mayor of his city.
The second, a Christian post declaring that New York had chosen the antichrist.
The contrast was jarring and it made me pause.
How quickly fear finds a microphone, and how easily faith forgets its own language.
Somewhere, between our certainties and our screens, we have learned to see threat before we see a person. We react before we listen. We defend “our” Jesus more fiercely than we follow the real one.
Yet the Jesus of the Gospels moved through the world differently.
He crossed boundaries others avoided. He spoke with those others feared.
He did not teach fear — He taught love.
“Love your neighbour as yourself.” — Mark 12:31
Such a simple command — and yet it undoes the entire machinery of fear if we dare to take it seriously.
When I think of that, I realise how often we forget Him, not the name, not the rituals, but the heart, the manner, the courage of His love.
The new mayor of New York is not a warning sign or a coded prophecy.
He is a person, seeking to serve, to lead, to navigate a city of impossible complexity.
When we reduce him to an idea — or worse, a danger — we reveal something broken not in him, but in ourselves.
Jesus never called us to protect the gospel with suspicion.
He called us to embody it with grace. Fear has never preserved faith; it has only made it smaller.
The Jesus we forget;
the one who saw people before labels,
who met differences with curiosity,
who broke bread instead of building walls.
Not the Jesus of panic and possession,
but the Jesus who trusted love more than fear.
To remember Him is not to recall a doctrine, but to re-enter a way of being —
to let His mercy shape our seeing.
And when we remember the Jesus we forget,
we might, at last, remember ourselves.
Philemon
(Inspired by Dan Foster )