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...

Living water is one of the many images the Gospel of John employs to describe what in other places the writer simply calls “eternal life.” Eternal life is, of course, eternal. Mel Blanc is a name that was associated with characters in Warner Brothers Looney Tunes for years. When at the end of a production Porky Pig came across the screen and said, “That’s all folks!” that was the voice of Mel Blanc. When he died his family engraved an inscription on his tombstone that read, “That’s all folks!” Christians refuse to believe that this life is all there is. There is more to come. We believe that we possess a life that transcends death.   The emphasis, however, in the phrase “eternal life” is not on the quantity of life, which is assumed, but on the quality of life—the kind of life it is. Almost always John’s Gospel speaks of eternal life in the present tense. It is a reality that is possessed now, that one enters into and experiences in this life/world.   So what is i...

The late Henri Nouwen is one of the most celebrated spiritual writers of the modern era. He taught at Yale and Harvard and wrote over 40 books, but for the last ten years of his life he lived with physically and mentally challenged people at the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto , Canada . In their little community, there were six people with disabilities and three other assistants besides Nouwen. None of the assistants were particularly trained to work with people who were mentally and physically challenged, but they received much help from doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and behavioral management people in their city. Writing of that community Nouwen says, “We all have our gifts, our struggles, our strengths and weaknesses. We eat together, play together, pray together, go out together. We all have our own preferences with regard to work, food, and movies, and we all have problems in getting along with someone in the house, whether handicapped or not. We laugh a lo...

One of the problems with some self-help plans is that they by-pass the absolutely necessary first step of all spiritual progress and growth, namely, that we are powerless to change ourselves and must surrender to the power of divine grace. Change that comes about through mere willpower and determination is not real spiritual change. The veil around our minds is often disguised as some great moral issue that makes us feel superior and asks nothing of us while asking everything from us. That sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. For those on the theological left, it can mean investing in some great social justice cause at great personal cost and sacrifice, while living one’s actual life in total isolation from any real suffering and without any personal transformation. For those on the theological right, it can mean investing heavily with great effort and sacrifice in some current political correctness or preaching a gospel of evacuation into heaven (it’s amazing how these two...