Lent has begun, and we need to live in this dark place between the ashes and the bread and wine, between the declaration of our mortality and the declaration of Christ’s redeeming work. Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of the darkness. We do so with hope,...
The outcome of Jesus’ arrest and trial was that brute force killed him in what appeared to be a triumph for the powers of evil. Yet that triumph of evil was limited and momentary. As the Gospels recount the story, three days later Mary Magdalene and other women, and...
Beware lest you make Christ into a Moses, and the gospel into a book of law or doctrine… In fact, however, the gospel demands no works to make us holy and to redeem us. Indeed, it condemns such works, and demands only faith in Christ, because he has overcome sin,...
To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded,...
When Richard Steele was about to be jailed for refusing to serve in the South African Defense Force, he had to consider the possibility that he might be killed in prison. “Was I prepared to die for what I believed?” he asked himself. I realized finally that I was, and...
Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life...
With the lingering taste of bread and wine, broken bread and empty cup, Jesus stared into the depths of the cup before him, the cup filled to the brim with suffering and death, even more, dereliction and abandonment. Agony filled Gethsemane. from A Scandalous...
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end; submit with...
Next to the calling of the disciples, I expect that Matthew’s story about their sending forth is one of the most confrontational stories in all the Bible. Can you imagine? There you are, perfectly content to be a follower, when Jesus comes home all worn out one day...
We seldom go freely into the belly of the beast. Unless we face a major disaster like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we usually will not go there. As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of...