According to Matthew, the whole grand experiment hangs on what happens with Joseph... The child is Joseph's until he says otherwise...the issue at stake is not a biological one but a legal one... Will he believe the impossible and give it a home or will he stick with...
If religious patriarchy was true, the angel of the Lord would have spoken first to Manoah about the miraculous conception of Samson. Instead, he spoke to Manoah’s wife—a woman—alone (Judges 13:2-24). If religious patriarchy was true, the angel Gabriel would have...
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all...
It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels... It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they'd tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they'd seen as hungry, tired, footsore as the rest of them. But it was also the...
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...
Mark depicts an entry which is triumphal only for Jesus' followers who have not yet understood his destiny as Son of Man. For Jesus, it is an entry into suffering and death. He enters Jerusalem as a pilgrim, and as more than a pilgrim. He makes no response to a royal...
People today sometimes talk about Easter as if the great message is that there really is life after death after all. That’s a very modern perception, which would occur only to somebody who had been brought up with the secularist denials of life after death. If that’s...
“Messiah” does not mean “your personal savior”; rather, the Messiah is the one who will come to establish a new order of the world that will end suppression discrimination, hunger, poverty and misery. Jesus accepts this designation. Yet his response to Peter contains...
Many times before, Jesus had turned down the chance to declare himself… Only on this day, first before the religious establishment and then before the political, only when his claims would seem the height of absurdity, did he admit to who he was. “The Son of God,” he...
He who speaks to us in Advent…knows the wilderness into which we have wandered, and the wildness of the world we have on our hands. It is precisely there we are to prepare the way of the Lord. Into the desert of this weary world we are thrust to transform and make it...