A Fresh Perspective

As far as my memories go back I remember being in the church house on Sundays. It did not always go well for me on Sundays. I can vaguely remember one Sunday when my parents and my best friend’s parents let us sit together during Sunday worship by ourselves. We decided to take the foil wrapper of a piece of chewing gum and make a little paper football. We had a whole side pew to ourselves so Keith slid over to one side and I to the other. We made goal posts with our hands and thumbs and kicked field goals. One of my kicks deviated from its intended path and landed inside a curl of the lady sitting in the pew directly in front of us. She was hard of hearing so we didn’t worry too much, but Keith got tickled and I got tickled, enough that our parents took note. Well, that was the last time we got to sit together for a very long time. I also remember as a kid sitting in worship as the preacher seemed to drone on and on thinking, “What person in their right mind would want to do this eve...

This teaching on love gets to the heart and soul of God’s will for humanity. Everything else is secondary. I wonder how so many Christians over the years have missed this. I wonder how I did for a significant part of my life and ministry. Matthew’s version of the teaching on love says, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, these two commandments – to love God with the totality of our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves – constitute the goal and fulfillment of healthy religion and what God longs to see in human relationships and society. Jesus is saying that everything that was good about the Torah and the writings of the classical Hebrew prophets pointed to this ultimate goal, namely, to teach us how to love. (That doesn’t mean, by the way, that everything in the law and the prophets teaches us how to love. Not everything in those writings are helpful in this regard. To assume they are is the fallacy of biblical inerrancy. What Je...

The author of John’s Gospel develops a sharp contrast between Mary’s free, most likely spontaneous expression of magnanimous love and Judas’ calculating complaint in John 12:1-6. Mary breaks open an expensive bottle of perfume, pours it lavishly on Jesus’ feet and then wipes his feet with her hair. John observes that the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. Judas, we are told, complained, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” The writer comments: “He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.” Scholars have argued that John’s portrait of Judas is biased and not historically accurate, that the author surely had an ax to grind. Maybe so. But that matters little to the one reading this story for spiritual guidance. What is significant is the kind of spirituality and religion Judas and Mary represent. ...