The questions that take longer than a morning.
The kindness of God leads you to repentance is usually preached at the back row. Paul aimed it at the man with the clipboard, who has been reading chapter 1 as a description of other people. Take Romans 2:4 out and four things quietly stop working, the last of them the gospel itself. Then a story for an eight-year-old, the four places it broke, and why kindness is the harder doctrine of the two.
Romans 2:1–5 · Norm Reed Download PDFAt Tyre the disciples, through the Spirit, kept telling Paul not to go on to Jerusalem, and he went. At Caesarea a true prophecy contains no instruction at all, and everyone in the house supplies the therefore. Three readings of the verse, each of which gives something up; three invented quotations from two AI assistants, all tidying in the same direction; and a pastor who once told me not to go back. Outcomes are not verification.
Acts 21:1–14 · Norm Reed Download PDFIn Athens Paul says God set the nations in their places so that they might seek him and perhaps feel their way towards him. The middle verb is the word for the blind groping in the dark, and Paul puts it in the mood of the thing hoped for and not counted on. Then the sentence turns: he is actually not far from each one of us. The reaching is honest, and on its own it does not get there. What changes is that God spoke, and then stood in a room and said touch me.
Acts 17:22–31 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe scattered were given the instruction — Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the end of the earth — and for a decade spoke the word to no one but Jews. Then some men of Cyprus and Cyrene, in a Greek city, spoke to Greeks. Luke keeps the names of a servant girl and a tanner. He does not keep theirs. From that unrecorded decision came the word Christian, the sending, and the argument that settled whether Gentiles belonged.
Acts 11:19–26; 13:1–3 · Norm Reed Download PDFA service sang about the power of the name of Jesus, and the sermon promised victory over the enemy — and I wondered how the apostles would have heard it. The name above every name was given because of the cross. Paul asks for the power of the resurrection so that he may share Christ’s sufferings. I can do all things is about hunger and plenty. Suffering for him is granted — the same word used for the name God gave Jesus. The martyrs saw power the same way.
Philippians 2–4 · Norm Reed Download PDFA young man who cannot stop sinning asks whether his repentance is real, and whether coming back again has become presumption. Simon discounts his debt; David puts his away; the young man keeps his open and then tries to pay it off. But the parable has nothing between could not pay and cancelled. And in every case the seeing arrives from outside — a story told by somebody who walks in. Nobody wants Nathan. We arrange our lives so that he cannot get close.
Luke 7:36–50; 2 Samuel 12 · Norm Reed Download PDFTwice in Luke 6 Jesus tells people they will be paid, and the word is misthos — not a prize but a wage, counted out and owed. Between the two sit the woes, and the rich have already been paid: the verb is the one written on a receipt. The first promise gives the size of the wage and where it is kept, and not what it is. The second says what it is. It is not something he gives you. It is someone you become.
Luke 6:20–36 · Norm Reed Download PDFTake John 13:3 out and the footwashing still happens — but the rising has nothing under it. The Greek is a participle, and it leans forward onto he rose in the next verse. Not although he knew what was his and where he had come from and where he was going, but because he did. A man who is not sure what he is worth can perform the action, but he will need something back for it. On three questions every man answers or fails to, a notebook on a plane in 2015, and Paul fathering a runaway slave from a cell with nothing to offer.
John 13:1–17 · Norm Reed Download PDFThirty years alongside Bill Vasilakis, and the difficulty of saying thank you for something that was not handed to you but done to you. Doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness — two of those are gifts you can feel while they are happening, and two are not. The word Paul uses for all four together is profitable, which is a cold and useful word, the sort of word you would use about a tool.
2 Timothy 3:16 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe Old Hundredth sung in a mournful tone at the end of a service, standing next to my mother; and I will enter His gates with thanksgiving sung years later with the music going and hands up. It took me a long time to notice they were the same psalm. Five verses, seven orders, every one of them plural — and one you cannot watch anybody do.
Psalm 100 · Norm Reed Download PDFZakar does not mean recall. It carries on into conduct, and the doing is how you can tell the remembering happened — which is why God remembering Noah is followed by wind over the water. What he remembers is covenant, more than anything else. Psalm 98:3 puts hesed where the formal word usually stands, and it is the only place he is reported as remembering his own.
Psalm 98:3 · Norm Reed Download PDFAn hour spent reading the giving pages of eleven churches, across five hundred years and two continents. Roofs, boilers, a pipe organ, broadcast equipment, a steeple floodlit and called a light on the hill — all of it legitimate, and not one of the six on any appeal. A sheep church is an iceberg; a goat church is the same iceberg turned over.
Matthew 7:21–23; Matthew 25 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe labourers in the vineyard, read inside the whole of Matthew 20 — a rich young man before it, Peter's what will we have, and a mother asking for two seats after. Only one group agreed a figure, and they are the only men who end up offended by what they were given. A contract is a limit you can put on someone else's generosity, and it holds.
Matthew 20 · Norm Reed Download PDFMatthew 11 ends with the offer of rest; Matthew 12 begins in a wheat field with hungry men being told off. The chapter number between them was added a thousand years later. He does not say lay down the yoke — he says take mine, and it is light because he is already in it. Behind both stands Hosea 6:6, the only verse Matthew quotes twice: hesed and da'at, set against sacrifice and expertise.
Matthew 11:28 – 12:8 · Norm Reed Download PDFOne word appears twice in Matthew and nowhere else — in the salt saying, and in the warning about pearls. What gets trampled is not something too good for the crowd; it is salt that has stopped being salt. Which changes what the pearl is, and leaves 7:6 giving a real danger and no way to tell who. Then Matthew 8 goes to a leper, a centurion and two men among the tombs.
Matthew 7:6; Matthew 8 · Norm Reed Download PDFSeek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Behind the Greek stands tzedaqah — rightness within a bond, which cannot be accumulated, because a man alone has nobody to be right with. So seeking is not to attain to it but to step into it. On five uses of the word across the Sermon, two Moravians who were refused permission to sell themselves and went anyway, and a church bus in Hobart.
Matthew 5–6 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe first recorded public words of the adult Jesus are not a claim but a concession — let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us. Not required, not owed. Fitting, and fitting for the two of them together. On what tzedaqah carried into Greek, why righteousness has no units, and a man who stood in a queue of people confessing sins he did not have.
Matthew 3:15; Romans 3:21–26 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 81 has been said every Thursday since the Temple, and six others hold the rest of the week. Seven psalms out of a hundred and fifty, fixed to the days — three of them about justice, one about God’s grief that his people will not listen, and no Psalm 23 among them. Forty-five years of reading, twice through the Psalter a year, and I did not know.
Psalm 81 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe line above a psalm is not a filing note — it is the only thing the psalm tells you about itself. Six headings, six reading instructions, and a book named after the label that appears exactly once. Psalm 76 as the worked example: a victory song about a morning nobody in the city fought for, which is why there is nothing in it to ask for.
Psalm 76 · Norm Reed Download PDFTen verses read, one verse prayed. Looking up horn recovered the picture — a ram coming up the road with its head back — and the psalm still would not pray. Recovering the picture was not the same as finding the occasion. On counting who is speaking, and what is left when the lines you cannot say are taken off you.
Psalm 75 · Norm Reed Download PDFThere is no word for cause in either famous verse. David said something nearer to “I only asked a question”; Psalm 74 asks God to prosecute a case. The translators did not change — English did. On four places a person can stand in front of a verse, and why the telling that carries the weight is the one that gets the details wrong.
1 Samuel 17:29; Psalm 74:22 · Norm Reed Download PDFTwo of the shortest stories Jesus told, read backwards from John 17. The man sells everything and buys the field — not the treasure, the dirt around it. If he is the buyer, what did he count worth everything? On kavod and hevel, the exchange Romans 1 calls a trade, and the one offer he refused.
Matthew 13:44–46; John 17 · Norm Reed Download PDFEveryone knows the first line. Almost nobody reads the other thirty-three verses. Psalm 68 never names an enemy — it describes one, four times over, and a description fits whoever fits it. The same word for the rebellious in the parched land is the word for the people God chooses to live among.
Psalm 68 · Norm Reed Download PDFSamuel tells the ark's arrival in twelve verses and names four people. Chronicles tells the same story in eighty-six verses and names more than forty. On what the Chronicler chose to expand, what he chose to leave out entirely, and why the lists were never a failure of storytelling.
1 Chronicles 15–17 · Norm Reed Download PDFA companion to An Interview with a Saint. My sister Ruth calls herself the black sheep of the family — and has quietly been the backbone of a church and a prison ministry for over a decade, without ever filing any of it under a category. On the two words we keep in our pockets for people, and the one Jesus refused to be embarrassed by.
Luke 15 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe word arrives already furnished — Francis, Teresa, held at a distance so the rest of us are let off. The New Testament's word for saint, hagioi, is almost always plural: not one figure but a room full of ordinary ones. A recorded conversation with the author's sister Jessica, about a week spent training to care for people with AIDS thirty years ago, and what it means that nobody is a saint alone.
Romans 1:7 · Philippians 1:1 · Norm Reed Download PDFA young man in Zechariah's second vision goes out to survey Jerusalem, and is stopped — the city will not hold still to be measured. What that reversal of the demolition-line has to do with a burned man in a prison visits room, a tablet with a poor signal, and the sentence that took fourteen years to get truer rather than easier: grace is not grace if you don't know the offence.
Zechariah 1–2 · Ephesians 3 · Norm Reed Download PDFMost vows to God are made in a car park or a waiting room, and they all have the same shape: if you get me out of this, I will — which assumes a trade. The obligation is real; what is misplaced is what the obligation is for. On what a neder was, why Ecclesiastes warns against making one lightly, and what Jesus was actually objecting to.
Psalm 61 · Ecclesiastes 5 · Matthew 5 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 58 is a psalm most Christians have never heard read aloud. Read alongside Psalm 82 and Matthew 23, it turns out to be saying what the gospel says — that authority given to protect the vulnerable, turned and used against them, has a name. Not a text the gospel improved on. A text that says what the gospel says.
Psalm 58 · Matthew 23 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe Greek word the Septuagint reaches for when translating hesed never appears in John's Gospel — not once in twenty-one chapters. But grace and truth, said twice in four verses at the very start, are almost certainly hesed we'emet in Greek clothing. The word doesn't go missing. It gets spent, once, and then John makes us watch it for twenty chapters.
John 1:14–17 · Norm Reed Download PDFDaniel 11–12 has cost the church more peace than almost anything else in the Old Testament. Four broad readings, each guarding something real, and not one of them defending a date. The book itself says who reads it rightly — not the one with the best chronology, but the one being refined.
Daniel 11–12 · Norm Reed Download PDFNebuchadnezzar on the roof of his palace, Howard Hughes in a sealed hotel room, Naaman in the Jordan, and a preacher buried in a pine box built by prisoners. Pride does not announce itself — it sounds, from the inside, like accuracy. The only real test is whether anyone is still able to tell you the truth, and whether you would listen.
Daniel 4 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 14 and Psalm 53 are almost the same psalm — same opening, same verdict, same ache at the end. Two lines have gone missing from the middle of Psalm 53: the company God is with, and the place the poor could hide. The same cry goes up out of Zion, with nowhere else to look.
Psalm 14 & Psalm 53 · Norm Reed Download PDFSong of Songs 1:2–4 traces desire as it learns to speak — from report, to address, to a request small enough to be answered. Mashak is not a delicate word: it is the word for drawing a bow taut, for hauling a body from a pit. She is not inventing a metaphor. She is asking, by name, for hesed.
Song of Songs 1:2–4 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 45 and the strange word at its centre. A King rides out in majesty for truth and righteousness — and meekness, sitting between two words about power where it should not be. Not softness, but power that refuses to grasp.
Psalm 45 · Norm Reed Download PDFTwenty-six names sit in the middle of Nehemiah 8, and most of us read straight past them. They are not a pause before the action — they are the subject of the sentence that matters most.
Nehemiah 8 · Norm Reed Download PDFWe say the Psalms will teach us to pray. Then the ground gives way.
Psalm 83 · Norm Reed Download PDFWhy the greatest of all songs opens not with the kiss but with the wanting of it — a close reading of Song of Songs 1:1. The grammar that lurches from third person to second, the doubled kiss the Hebrew refuses to simplify, and the time the poem declines to fix.
Song of Songs 1:1 · Norm ReedWhat Job and David staked everything on before either of them had proof — and what it gives a pastor standing at a graveside. Six movements from the ash heap to the resurrection, and the one word both men reached for when pressed to the floor.
Job 19:25–27 · Psalm 17:15 · Norm Reed Download PDFWhat Jeremiah reveals about the God who interrupts his own judgment. The grief behind the oracle, the ancient paths of Jeremiah 6:16, and the sentence from Lamentations that changes everything about how we read the prophets.
Jeremiah · Lamentations 3:32–33 · Norm Reed Download PDFIf we take the gospels seriously as the description of how Jesus actually conducted his ministry, does the leadership he modelled map onto the formation the contemporary church offers its pastors? Five movements, two weekly calendars, and the questions that don't go away.
A Hesedwords Reflection · Norm Reed Download PDFThe arc of desire in the Song of Songs — from longing into belonging into open-handed offering — and what interrupts it. The warm bed, the idol as ordinary comfort, Paul's anatomy of the divided self in Romans 7, and the hesed that kindles what we cannot work up in ourselves.
Song of Songs 5 · Romans 7 · Norm ReedOn nasa and sabal — the difference between the idols we must carry and the God who carries us.
Isaiah 46:4