You wonder how long my love will last? Find your answer on a splintered cross on a craggy hill. That’s me you see up there, your maker, your God, nail-stabbed and bleeding. Covered in spit and sin-soaked. That’s your sin I’m feeling. That’s your death I’m dying....
It seems that there is something written into the very fabric of human beings that longs for Easter. There is at the core of our lives a yearning for resurrection.
Do not bother looking for Lent in your Bible dictionary, because there was no such thing back then. There is some evidence that early Christians fasted forty hours between Good Friday and Easter, but the custom of spending forty days in prayer and self-denial did not...
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a Eucharistic community, ceaselessly...
Holy Thursday. Is this a holy thing to seeIn a rich and fruitful land,Babes reduc’d to misery,Fed with cold and usurious hand? Is that trembling cry a song?Can it be a song of joy?And so many children poor?It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine,And...
In Jesus’ triumphal entry, the adoring crowd makes up the ragtag procession: the lame, the blind, the children, the peasants from Galilee and Bethany. When the officer looks for the object of their attention he spies a forlorn figure, weeping, riding…on the back of a...
Jesus himself had mixed feelings during the clamorous parade. Luke reports that as he approached the city he began to weep. He knew how easily a mob could turn. Voices who shout “Hosanna!” one week can shriek “Crucify Him!” the next. from The Jesus I Never...
It is, of course, impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of what is commonly known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and promises, Christ had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He would only be revered as an extremely good...
The cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death. In his time, the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. Today, too, it is considered...
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...