Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
How would I know what Jesus would have done? That fella was a mass of contradictions as far as I can see. One minute he says to turn the other cheek, the next minute he's having a big strop and kicking over lads' market stalls. He says blessed are the meek and he goes around shouting and roaring the odds to everyone. He rises from the dead and then shags off a few weeks later and leaves his buddies in the shit.
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them, but OUTSIDE them. Our Divine Lord, however, identified Divine Wisdom with Himself. It was the first time in history that it was ever done, and it has never been done since.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Life is one great big wonderful but terrifying adventure. It can be as brutal as it is beautiful. There are no do-overs. We get a single shot to make it home. And guess what? We all wander and find ourselves lost from time to time. Enter our Savior. The One whose love and power to heal and example to guide is so magnificent that our frail human minds can’t begin to comprehend.
judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it.
How one in the modern world views Jesus's miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.
I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical cultural series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh.
When Jesus was wrapping up his days on earth, he didn't tell us to go to church. He didn't tell us to engage in a spiritualized version of channel surfing, as we hop from place to place in search of just the right programming to entertain us. He told us to get out and actually do the stuff he'd already been doing, painting the hope of God's reign on the canvas of God's world. He told us we're artists.
My nun, which is how I think of her, was the most profound witness for God's love I've ever encountered in this world. She was a magnet for lost souls, a petite fortress of strength and unconditional love. What this sprightly, silly, lovely woman did from the obscurity of a faded convent in Rust Belt Chicago was to fulfill in a passionate, tireless way the supreme commandment of Jesus' gospel every day of her life.
God hijacks and bends evil to work peace and healing. If God were only a God of justice, He could punish evil but do no more. Only a God of grace can use our evil to work His good. God’s grace is so much bigger than our sin . Sometimes He’ll let us pursue our idolatry until it kills us. Then He will resurrect us and turn our evil into testimonies of God’s grace.Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (p. 86).
The Bible says that each person is a sinner and everyone is wicked in the sight of God. God cannot allow sin into Heaven, so we must get rid of our sin somehow. If we don’t, then we have no hope of Heaven.”Jesus is the only one who can take our sins away. The Bible says that God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. Jesus came down from Heaven and died on the cross for our sins.
But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. He pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there.
I learned that faith isn’t about knowing all of the right stuff or obeying a list of rules. It’s something more, something more costly because it being present and making a sacrifice. Perhaps that’s why Jesus is sometimes called Immanuel - “God with us.” I think that’s what God had in mind, for Jesus to be present, to just be with us. It’s also what He has in mind for us when it comes to other people.
