The crowd at Jesus’ crucifixion challenged him to prove himself by climbing down from the cross, but not one person thought of what actually would happen: that he would die and then come back. …The style fit God’s pattern and character. God has always chosen the slow...
The story is about Jesus but is also about each of us. Palm Sunday asks what Jerusalem is for you and me. What in your life and mine is the walled city where we must ultimately go if we are to find life? What is the Jerusalem that awaits our arrival, where we will...
…because of the narrative we know best,we discover that in the rock where you had nestled us,You have blown the rock open from the inside.You have rolled the stone away,You have surged out of a tomb-like womb, a womb-like tomb,And are back surging in the world, to...
Easter is a feast and is celebrated as the feast of freedom. For Easter is the beginning of the laughter of the redeemed and the dance of the liberated and the creative game of fantasy. Since earliest times Easter hymns have celebrated the victory of life by laughing...
We believe in his resurrection! Is this true? Do we believe all that is involved in this? He is the living one. He is the victor over sin and death. He is not one who ascended into heaven in order to disappear from world history as if he had never been in it. He...
Resurrection is not a deferred consolation—”the opium of the next world.” It is the power which enables this life to be reborn. The hope is directed, not towards a different world but towards the redemption of this one. In the Spirit, resurrection is not merely...
It wasn’t the morality of the Sermon on the Mount which enabled Christianity to conquer Roman paganism, but the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. In an age when Roman senators vied to see who could get the most blood of a steer on their togas—thinking...
Apart from the resurrection, Jesus has no more claim upon us than Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Anwar Sadat: He was simply one among many good leaders who managed to meet an unjust death. from Calendar: Christ’s Time for the...
Jesus was this kind of giver. He is the greatest sign to us that life need not be dreary, need not be saved, but can be, must be, entirely spent. It is fear that makes us hold on to life or to what represents life’s meaning for us. The cross marked the place in...
For at least some of the followers of Jesus, maybe the worst day was the third one, Sunday, which for the Jews was like our Monday, with everything around them returning so completely to normal that it was impossible to believe that either his life or his death was...