Replying to @GatherClip **Genesis 3.** Adam and Eve hear the sound of him walking in the garden, and they hide. Sit with what they're hiding in. He built that garden for them. Every tree in it, including the one they crouched behind. They used his own gift as cover, from him. And the footsteps don't stop. He keeps walking, and he speaks first, and the first thing out of his mouth is a question: where are you. Then at the end of that same day he makes them clothes with his hands and dresses them himself (Genesis 3:21). They ran. He followed them and clothed them. **Exodus 32.** I always pictured the golden calf as one bad afternoon. Read what it actually took. Aaron tells them to strip the gold rings out of the ears of their wives and their sons and their daughters, so somebody collects jewelry off an entire nation. Then a fire hot enough to melt gold, which is not a campfire. Then casting. Then, the text says, he finished it with a graving tool. That's days of work with plenty of time in the middle for somebody to say, should we be doing this. Six weeks after they said I do. **Exodus 33.** After the calf, God tells Moses he will still get them to the land. He'll send an angel ahead of them, drive out everyone in the way, deliver everything he promised. And then he says why: I will not go up in your midst, because you are a stiff-necked people, and if I go with you I will consume you on the road. That's not punishment, that's the truth about what being that close to him would do to them right then. And Moses says the best sentence a human being has ever said back to God. If your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here (Exodus 33:15). He turns down the land, the milk and honey, the angel, the guaranteed victory. He'd worked out what the whole thing was for. **The land was never the gift. He was.** Then the tent goes up and the cloud comes down over it, and he moves into the middle of a camp full of people who had just proved exactly what they were, for forty years. There's a line in Exodus that stops the story to say the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night never departed from before the people. A whole verse, just to say he stayed. **Matthew 26.** A man who ate dinner with him for three years brings soldiers in the dark and kisses him. The kiss verb is the same one used when the father runs to the prodigal and falls on his neck (Luke 15:20). He took the gesture that means I love you and used it as the signal. Then Jesus answers with one word, and I need to correct myself on it, because in the video I called it friend and that is not quite what it is. The Greek is *hetairos*, and it is not *philos*, the warm word. Matthew is the only writer in the New Testament who uses it, three times, and every time it is said to somebody who is in the wrong and is being confronted. What it actually is, per Kittel's dictionary, is a word that always names a mutually binding relation between the two people. A claim rather than a compliment. Judas is trying to end a relationship with a kiss, and Jesus opens his mouth and uses the one word that means you and I are still tied together. He will not let the man dissolve it by himself. Then he says his name. Judas (Luke 22:48). The accurate version is heavier than the one I gave on camera, and I would rather hand you that. Look at the two lists. Ours is every step away. His is every step closer. And not one item on our list surprised him, because before there was a garden to lose he had already seen the whole bill and said, I want her, and I'll pay for it. So that ache at eleven at night, the homesickness for somewhere you can barely picture? That's the sound of him still walking. Same footsteps from the garden, still coming, still refusing to stand at the edge and wait for you to pull yourself together first. #threadofeverything #Love #ChristianFaith #jesus #youareloved - @threadofeverything