Eventide & Altar

You are a man, not a god. Ezekiel says this to the prince of Tyre - and it is a sentence worth turning over slowly at this point in life. Not as a rebuke, but as a form of relief.

The prince's error was not that he had wisdom or wealth. His error was the conclusion he drew from them: that he was sufficient, that his accumulation had made him something other than what he was. You are a man. You are a woman. You are a creature. What you have built does not change what you are - and that is the truth that makes grace possible, not a diminishment.

Jesus says: for men this is impossible, but for God all things are possible. Salvation is not a human achievement at any level of wealth or poverty. It is what God does with human material - the camel through the needle, the impossible made actual.

Peter's question is the honest one: what will there be for us? He has given up things and he wants to know whether it was worth it. Jesus honors the directness. A hundredfold. Eternal life. The last will be first. The giving-up was not a loss. It was the opening.

A long life of discipleship accumulates its own kind of answer to Peter's question. Looking back, what have you received that you could not have received while holding onto what was asked of you? The hundredfold rarely arrives in the same category as what was surrendered.

The Sorrowful Mysteries. The giving-up at Gethsemane, the losing of everything on the cross, and what came after. Pray them for everyone who is still in the middle of the giving-up, not yet at the hundredfold.

• For those who are still in the giving-up and cannot yet see what will come after, that the promise would hold them in the waiting, we pray to the Lord.
• For those whose accumulation has begun to feel like sufficiency - who have started to hear the prince of Tyre's voice in their own thinking - that the honest sentence would reach them: you are a man, you are a woman, not a god, we pray to the Lord.
• For the last who feel like last, that they would know what Jesus said: the last will be first, we pray to the Lord.

Name something you have given up for the sake of following - a real thing, a thing that cost you. Then look at what you have received instead - not necessarily in the same category, not necessarily obviously connected. The hundredfold is rarely a straight exchange. Let yourself see it honestly.