To accept a Christian identity is to carry with you a grief for a hope yet fulfilled, a world not fully redeemed.  It’s to walk around with this hole in your life and to accept that Christ is present to us as an absence of what we most dearly long for.  Whenever two of us are walking on the road, there is this emptiness beside us, an incompleteness, and then anyone, friend or stranger, can come along and occupy that emptiness and assume the place of Jesus.  “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them,” Jesus taught.  

One thing the gospel writers all agree on as they tell about that first day of the week, is that the women who were the first witnesses of resurrection, were the same women who witnessed the crucifixion.  In other words, it was those who accompanied Jesus to the edge of death, who were the first to hear and see the depth, and breadth, and unanticipated eruption of life that is resurrection.

I am heartened to imagine the Jesus of the triumphal entry as a Jesus of creative resistance, staged satire, peaceful yet profound confrontation. This is a Jesus who is one with the poor, the marginalized, those rejected by institutional powers, those dismissed by society. Because these are his experiences, too.

Economics is so central to the vision of the kingdom of God because it has to do with relationships.  Economics is relationships.  Salvation economics is not so much about doing without money as it is about participating in exchanges that affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every person and the integrity of the earth.