Do you understand why he upset them? I used to think the reason Jesus was crucified was because he picked a bad century. Now, it wouldn't make any difference. He could come to Louisville during this last decade of the 20th century and if he did the kind of preaching,...
This again is a great contradiction: though he [Jesus] was a Jew, his followers were not Jews.
Jesus experienced the silence of God in the company and companionship of his closest friends. Did they fail him? Yes, perhaps here more than anytime earlier in his ministry, but they did not fail him completely, at least not yet. They were with him--awake or asleep,...
Society called the blind sinful, a female child useless, a menstruating woman unclean, all of them marginal to the system, condemned to the fringes of life, excluded from the center of the synagogue, barred from the heart of the temple. But Jesus takes each of them to...
Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with...
Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to. I didn't believe in dragging souls into some special club of the saved... My only sense of "mission" now was to show others that they, too, could feed and touch and heal...
Help me to understand, O God, how intimately healing is related to the presence of your realm. Grant that I may not only be healed myself, so that I am whole in your Spirit, but also that I may reach out with healing to others. Through Jesus, the worker of miracles,...
The metaphor of rebirth, being born of the Spirit, is an image of radical transformation. An old life has been left behind, and a new life has begun. It has a number of metaphorical equivalents in the New Testament. In Paul, dying and rising with Christ, being...
To paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, a contemporary author and activist for us as Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus. To paraphrase Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, and bishop of the Church...
Salvation is personal, but this hardly needs emphasis... What does need emphasis is that Salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel's story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together. Salvation is...