Punishment, pt. 1
We tend to think of growth as a straight line—upward, onward, done. But the prophets of Israel knew better. Their books, read together, trace something closer to a spiral: naming what’s broken, feeling its weight, and finding a way back to life on the other side. Not accusation, punishment, and renewal as courtroom terms, but as the shape of how anything—a person, a people, a planet—actually changes. In this series, we'll walk through the book of Isaiah as a map for that spiral, exploring how this same re-ordering movement can re-order us: naming what's true, grieving what's gone wrong, and rising into something more whole.
This week, Jesus meets a question many of us carry in our bones—“Am I being punished?”—and offers a very different way to make meaning of loss and suffering. Along the way we trace how what happens to us can move from punishment, to consequence, to gift.