So there is a powerful personal meaning to Good Friday and Easter. The followers of Jesus are invited into the journey that leads through death to new life. Personal transformation is utterly important. Without it, we remain within the world of our socialization, a...
Friday The sky peels back to purple and thunder slaps the thighs of heaven, and all the tears of those who grieve fly up to clouds and are released and drench the earth. The ones who see and hear know that all is lost. The only One named Savior died upon a cross. The...
The feeble gospel goes back to Jesus as our model, our example, and is much concerned with moral injunctions. It sees his teaching as a fine set of ideals at which to aim. It may not do much harm but it has no power to change your life: it is a faith built in sand...
Resurrection means God’s way prevails. When Jesus died, most thought his teachings died with him, overpowered and silenced by the might of “the system.” The power of entrenched interests seemed triumphant. We understand. Experience teaches us large systems and even...
“Messiah” does not mean “your personal savior”; rather, the Messiah is the one who will come to establish a new order of the world that will end suppression discrimination, hunger, poverty and misery. Jesus accepts this designation. Yet his response to Peter contains...
Am I afraid to die? I am every time I let myself be seduced by the noisy voices of my world telling me that my “little life” is all I have and advising me to cling to it with all my might. But when I let these voices move to the background of my life and listen to...
It is a help to think of the life and death of Jesus as sacrifice, but the word needs to be used with care. In the world of religion a sacrifice is either an offering to the ultimately holy or the giving up of something in devotion to the holy. The two ideas can blend...
As someone has put it, the biblical understanding of human beings is not that they have bodies, but that they are bodies… Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep. The Bible...
The root meaning of the word “martyr” is “witness.” The implication is that when people die for what they believe, they have said something important that we need to hear. In a strange way, believing that there are values greater than our own life and coming to terms...
He descended into hell. That is very cheerful news… There is nothing I have known this side of hell that is unfamiliar to him. There is nothing known to me which I am wont to call hell which he has not already known. Nor is there anything beyond these realms which,...