A Fresh Perspective

Today’s Gospel reading is a text that I think many Christians misread and therefore misapply. I said last week that Jesus knows the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem. The handwriting is on the wall. Jesus does not need any special revelation to know that the religious authorities want him out of the picture. He has preached and practiced an inclusive table fellowship, inviting all sorts of people who were disdained and considered unworthy by the gatekeepers. He intentionally violated laws that the religious establishment used to create a worthiness system to keep people under their control. He provoked them and challenged their authority in various ways. And when he leads a peace march into Jerusalem, which is what Palm Sunday is about, and then afterward when he stages a protest in the Temple, he seals his fate. He will perish at their hands. And, as I said last week, he also knows that unless his people change their ways they too will perish at the hands of the Romans. And a fe...

Jesus knows his death is imminent. Hence the cryptic statement, “I am casting out demons and performing cures today, tomorrow, and the third day I finish my work.” I suspect that in the passing on of this tradition the third day reference was added at some point, which is an allusion to God’s resurrection and vindication of Jesus. We have the same thing in Jesus’ passion announcements to his disciples. Looking back after the event it all forms one piece: his life, death, and vindication by God. Jesus knows he’s going to die at the hands of the religious and political leaders. The handwriting is on the wall. Jesus knows something else too. He also knows that his people are headed for disaster. He can feel the animosity of his countrymen toward their oppressors, the Romans. He can since the growing anger and hate. He knows where it will lead and what will happen. They will clash, and the Romans will bring to bear their powerful army on his people, Israel. Maybe Jesus thought that i...

In my book, Being a Progressive Christian , I have a piece tilted, "God's Loving Judgment." I argue that God's judgment, whatever it may consist of, is restorative and redemptive, not punitive and retributive. I never speculate on how God judges and what that may involve or look like. A spiritual growth group using my book presented me with the question, "How do we know God is correcting us?" Below is my response: Your  question actually must be addressed in light of a larger question about how God actually works in the world and in our lives.  I don’t see God intervening in “judgment” or “blessing” the way the prophets sometimes envisioned. The Jewish view of God tended to see God as the transcendent "Other." Over and separate from the creation. I think when we get to the revelation in Jesus that view of God begins to shift. God is here and now. In God we “live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).   According to Paul we are indwelt by Go...

This brief account of Jesus’ testing could leave the impression that his testing came and went quickly. To counter that Luke tells us that Jesus was in the desert forty days. Forty is a symbolic number. It’s the number of days it rained in the great flood and the number of years Israel wandered in the wilderness. The number simply represents a lengthy period of time. Temptation never really ends. We face new tests all through our life’s journey. For both Jesus and us, the Devil represents anything that presents a roadblock that would hinder us and prevent us from continuing on the spiritual path God has for us. We need not look outside ourselves for the Devil, for the greatest Devil we face is within us – our own ego. All three of the temptations Jesus confronts involves very subtle appeals to the ego. It would be convenient for us if the testing we face was something completely outside ourselves, for then we could excuse ourselves, like Flip Wilson used to say on “Laugh In”: Th...

Spiritual teacher Richard Rohr likes to say that our tendency is to see things, not as they are, but as we are. The point he makes is that many things in our lives prevent us from seeing what really is. Our capacity to see reality is shaped by many factors: our upbringing and the ways we are socialized into adulthood, our education, our social and community networks, our physiology and genetics, our religious faith and the ways we are indoctrinated into that faith. All kinds of influences affect how we see. Thus, the truism: We see as we are, rather than what really is. In his wonderful piece on love in his first letter to the Corinthians Paul makes the point that we all see a “poor reflection as in a mirror.” The NRSV says, we see “dimly.” We are all limited and biased in what and how we see. That’s part of the human condition. However, I believe, that we will see truth and reality more clearly if we see through the lens of Jesus. Everything in our scriptural text today is focu...