It's about participation in Christ and not substitution by Christ. And we...are invited to travel with Jesus through execution to resurrection. The Last Supper is about bread for the world, God's justice against human injustice, a New Passover from bondage to...
Holy Week invites us to look deeper at our commitment. It calls our first-rate commitment to second-rate causes into question.
The person to whom we pray, the man we hope to follow, the one who is risen from the dead, understands us--because he lived a human life, and one that, particularly in his final week, was filled with suffering. from Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper...
I am sometimes amazed, even alarmed, at the extent to which people judge ministers by their preaching, and preaching by its rhetoric. To do so is to make the entirely spurious but nearly universal assumption that God is better served by a poet than by an accountant....
The inherent legalism of the Western Church trains our eyes on Jesus' suffering as the judgment of God upon our sin & virtually blinds us to the more obvious point that Jesus suffered from the wickedness of humanity. It was the human race, not the Father, who...
You are risen in power and wonder;You are risen out of the shambles of death and terror and doubt and fear;You are risen to turn the world to peace and justice and freedom and well-being;You are risen with healing wings to cure our diseased hurts and our public...
We are not loved because we are so beautiful and good. We are beautiful and good because we are loved. from Theology of Joy
The stories of the Resurrection, as hard as they are for modern ears to comprehend, mean that the life Jesus lived and the project he pursued (the Kingdom of God) did not perish at the crucifixion, but continued in the lives of those who carried on what he had begun....
Jesus' procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate's procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus' procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This...
The human race is, was, and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. We don't want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and...