Throughout his Gospel, Luke shows us Jesus praying. Jesus prays before he calls his disciples, before asking them who he is, at the time of his transfiguration, before teaching his disciples how to pray, on the night of his arrest, and at his death. For Luke, what is...
When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), he is personifying mammon as a rival god. In saying this, Jesus is making it unmistakably...
People are hungry for love. Are we aware of that? Do we know that? Do we see that? Do we have eyes to see? Quite often we look but we don't see. We are all just passing through this world. We need to open our eyes and see. Since we cannot see Christ, we cannot express...
The Cosmic or Universal Christ is the divine lure, a blinking, brilliant light set as the Omega Point of time and history that keeps reminding us that love, not death, is the eternal thing. Love, which is nothing more than endless life, is luring us forward, because...
Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn't show us how to reliably...make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick...
The name bestowed upon Jesus is Lord, acknowledged in what may be the earliest form of the confession of faith among gentile Christians: Jesus is Lord (Rom. 10:9; Acts 2:36). Submission to the lordship of Christ, however, is not confined to the human realm; Christ is...
If it pleases Jesus to distribute his voice among a wide range of singers and musical dialects, it would profit us to accommodate our preferences and principles to his. from With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in Our Worship
I now read Christ's being "lifted up" as image language echoing a passage in the letter to the Ephesians that speaks of God putting all things "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:22). As a beautiful paraphrase puts it: God has put everything without exception into Christ's...
What Jesus taught was a radical message of welcome and inclusion and love. I feel certain God loves me just the way I am, and I have a huge sense of calling to communicate that to young people. When I think of myself at 13, sobbing into that carpet, I just want to...
If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not...