A Fresh Perspective

Regardless of what you or I or any Christian believes about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection or what a resurrected state of existence might look like, I think the real message of Easter has to do with what it means to trust in and be faithful to the reality and power of Christ in our lives today. Easter is not simply about God raising a human being from the dead, which I personally don’t think is that big of a deal for God to do. I think the big deal of Easter is what it says to you and me right now. And what it says is that the faith, hope, and love of Jesus, the goodness and grace of Jesus, the compassion and comfort of Jesus, the courage and prophetic critique and challenge of Jesus is present right now and accessible right now. I love this image in John’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene clinging to Jesus once she realizes it is Jesus. It calls to mind all the ways I try to keep Jesus in my little box and all the ways I cling to the same old tired and worn ways of thinking and reacti...

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). These words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel are equivalent to Jesus’s words in John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” The Gospels of Mark and Matthew include only one saying of Jesus from the cross: His cry of abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The other six sayings of Jesus are found in Luke and John. In Mark and Matthew the emphasis is on Jesus as a participant in our suffering. Jesus shares our pain and loss. Jesus knows what it is like to feel forsaken, even by God. Jesus, for the most part, is a passive victim. In Luke and John, Jesus is still a victim, but he is not passive. There is no sense of Jesus feeling forsaken in Luke or John. In Luke’s portrait, Jesus dies as a courageous and faithful martyr. We need both portraits. We need to know that God suffers with us, that God identifies with our experiences of forsakenness and feelings of abandonment. But we also n...

A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19:29). According to a consensus of scholarship, Mark’s Gospel was written first just before, during, or shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. One to two decades later the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written. Finally, one to two decades after Matthew and Luke came the Gospel of John. All the Gospels are first and foremost spiritual and theological proclamations of the meaning of the story of Jesus, not historical reports. But John’s symbolism, Jesus monologues, and metaphorical storytelling takes it to a new level. In John the cross of Jesus is the culmination of a cosmic drama. At the cross, the worlds of ungrace and grace collide; the powers of death and life meet with explosive force. As Jesus anticipates...

Holy Week begins with Jesus riding into Jerusalem. It seems rather clear from the text that Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem on a young colt was intentional and prearranged. He gives very specific instructions to two of his disciples on where to find the colt. As he   processes into Jerusalem with his disciples, Luke tells us that the people kept throwing their cloaks on the road and as he approached the path down the Mount of Olives into the city of Jerusalem his disciples began to proclaim, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.” Luke’s version differs somewhat from Mark and Matthew. In Mark they say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord and blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming.” In Matthew they call Jesus “Son of David” and in Luke they say “Blessed is the King.” While only Luke calls Jesus King and all the accounts are slightly different, in all three accounts Jesus is certai...

In this passage, which reflects Paul’s intense spiritual passion, Paul seems to be taking on a group of Christian Jews who were apparently insisting that in order to please God all Christians needed to fully keep the Jewish law in its entirety. In response Paul says that if anyone could glory in keeping the law it would be him. He took great pride in his heritage and his strict obedience to all things Jewish. He was so serious about his obedience to the law that he considered himself “blameless.” But all the things that Paul put great value and stock in, he deemed as “rubbish” in comparison to “knowing” Christ and “gaining” Christ. When Paul says that he wants to know Christ he is not talking about knowing facts about Christ. One of the things that has always puzzled interpreters of Paul is how few references he makes to the historical Jesus. It was the living Christ that occupied his attention, whom he encountered in a dramatic way as a Pharisee and which changed the course of hi...

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When Mother Teresa’s private journals were published after her death, the startling revelation to so many was that her writings spoke of long periods where the absence of God was more real to her than God’s presence. In these extended dry periods, she did not sense nor feel God’s presence. The only word that Mark’s Gospel tells us Jesus uttered from the cross was this word of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s a question, not a declaration and it reflects the sense of God’s absence that overtook Jesus when he was hanging on the cross. Jesus is echoing the cry of the Psalmist in Psalm 22, who is looking for God’s deliverance, but God does not act. Jesus was not expecting deliverance. He had already conceded to his fate. He wrestled with t...

I feel rather certain that the father in this story is intended to be an image of God. Of course, the point of emphasis has to do with the attitude and actions of the father, not the maleness of the father. God is not male or female. God is not a person the way we are persons though God is able to relate to each of us personally. God is Spirit. Gender is irrelevant. The question is: As God’s sons and daughters how are we called to be like God, whether we use a father image or a mother image or some other image? And that question, unlike many questions that we ask about God, has an answer that is really pretty simple: the most important way we are called to be like God is in the way we love others. We can become more like God in the way we love, first, by becoming more inclusive in our acceptance and compassion for others. Bibles that list headings before segments and units of text generally call this section the parable of the prodigal son. Unfortunately, that sometimes influences...

"After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), 'I am thirsty.'" The Gospel of John is characterized by a very high Christology that is often read back into the stories of Jesus. This is undoubtedly at least one of the factors that guides the way the author (John’s community) shapes and reformulates the sayings of Jesus into lengthy dialogues and monologues. Sometimes in John’s narrative the divinity of Jesus trumps his humanity. This brief word of Jesus from the cross found exclusively in John’s Gospel is a case in point. Jesus’s expression, “I am thirsty,” on the surface seems to reflect a very human Jesus, but in introducing these words, John presents Jesus as being in complete control, intentionally fulfilling Scripture. (All the Gospels emphasize the fulfillment of Scripture in the passion story, but John does this more than the others. The reference here seems to be to Psalm 69:22, which in the LXX (t...