It is probably impossible for us credibly to imagine Jesus’ solitude in the garden called Gethsemane.
As his heart and mind writhed in agony before his impending execution and the lived experience of abandonment by his Father, his friends, too, deserted him for sleep. Continue Reading »
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It was inevitable, as the early Jesus movement spread from one city to the next, that people would covet its power without loyalty to its source.
One imagines that the movement’s leaders were as surprised as anyone to see the power of Christ flowing through their words and hands to liberate the mad and heal the sick. Happily, the Book of Acts provides more than one glimpse of the earliest stewards of such remarkable power fending off the misguided adulation of the crowds. But sometimes the threat of corruption reared its head via the jealousy of impressed onlookers who stood outside the immediate circle of the Jesus community. Continue Reading »
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Sometimes those closest to Jesus understand nothing, while someone with no ‘Jesus history’ comprehends immediately. It has always been so.
Jesus explains to his disciples that Jerusalem, their portentous destination, holds out for him no obvious good:
And taking the twelve, he said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.’ (Luke 18:31–33 ESV)
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The biblical proverbs rarely aim for the fence. They just keep poking singles.
Rarely does the Book of Proverbs open a window to stupendous secrets that were heretofore unknown. Rather, it gradually builds a home out of the cumulative lessons learned by people who pay attention, brick upon brick, one small board after another fixed in just the right place with little fanfare and no shouting.
One man pretends to be rich and has nothing; Another professes to be poor and has much wealth. (Proverbs 13:7 JPS)
Attentive people know that things are often not as they appear. Continue Reading »
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A kind of self-oriented religiosity craves a formula.
We want a rule, a predictable sequence, a guaranteed outcome.
Admittedly, the Christian message is, from one angle of view, simple. Its redeeming beauty hides behind no intellectual prerequisite, no gate-keeping aesthetic sensitivity, no necessary spiritual predisposition. It’s the walking wounded, the drooling madman, the self-loathing sinner who seizes its promise before the sophisticate can get past his first reflexive sneer. Continue Reading »
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Rational calculation, as we know it, is of limited value in assessing life’s larger moves.
Take Jesus’ parables about people, animals, and things that have gone missing. He intends to speak, of course, about his Father’s love. Such stories are not permeated by the sentimental, but neither do they hew to the mathematics of evaluation. Continue Reading »
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Jesus rarely made things easy.
He forced upon his hearers choices they would rather have avoided. When he found that a kind of celebrity had attached itself to him, he faced down the crowds with a kind of rhetorical fury that must have been only partially offset by the love in his voice.
The gushing of the masses appears to have represented a kind of threat. In the face of it, he said the damnedest things. Continue Reading »
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Our mind is shaped by a culture that privileges experience and feeling above all other windows into reality.
We no longer even say, with the writers of love songs, ‘It feels so good it must be real’. We are content if it simply feels good, with no further questions asked. Continue Reading »
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Life with people often seems like a storm of chaos, intending to damage.
We are violent. If we cannot imagine striking out with our fists, then we destroy with a word, a sneer, the quick and lethal rolling of two eyes. With our need to voice disagreement with anything and anyone, as though the world waited breathlessly to know what I think about things that hardly matter. Continue Reading »
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The faint heart is often insomniac. What is it about the 3:00 a.m. hour, so full of worries, fears, and untimely wakefulness? As though on schedule, eyes open and the faint heart races. Life’s shadows loom taller and more menacing than usual. Improbable fears seem perfectly plausible. Things that will shrink into proportion in the light of day take the shape of lethal threats and impassable walls. The sixty-first psalm relieves us of at least one of our disabling fears: that we cannot pray because our heart is faint. Continue Reading »
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Canter Bridge 