Disciples ask Jesus for help, “Teach us to pray.” Included in Jesus’ response he says, “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will…
When last with Jesus, Peter was being threatened by rulers and their soldiers. Fearing they might arrest him along with Jesus, Peter denied knowing Jesus, three times. Seeing Jesus after his resurrection, Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?,” three times. Peter is true to his love of Jesus which means, like Jesus, he…
There is a gross violence done by institutional christianity’s interpretation of Jesus’ torture and death. It is not only normalized; it is sanctified. The torture and violence done to Jesus on the cross is perversely claimed as saving us. Nothing about anyone being tortured saves us. Nothing about a cross saves us. Nothing about…
“Jesus was teaching his disciples and telling them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him.” What does it feel like to be a good man and know you are going to be killed? It is so incredibly sad. A life will be taken and the…
Paul of Tarsus writes of his belief about the end of the world and an afterlife, “in Christ all shall be brought to life, but each one in proper order.” For Paul that order means “when everything is subjected” to the supremacy of chosen faithful and then to God. When Jesus speaks about the…
Jesus is talking with disciples about wise attendants at a wedding who bring oil for their lamps. He speaks also of their counterparts, foolish attendants. The foolish attendants want the oil the wise ones have brought. The wise ones tell them, “’No.’” The wise ones have taken their needed and helpful action and the…
Jesus is cautioning listeners about rulers, “They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.” The heaviest of burdens laid upon people’s shoulders is the annihilating weaponry rulers keep producing. Not only will rulers not lift a finger to…
The Pharisees were upset about Jesus continually challenging them. They “plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech.” They construed a dilemma, a choosing of sides – or so they thought, between God and Caesar. Rulers like to trap people in conflicts. They like to trap people into taking sides in conflicts. Shall we…
Jesus tells a parable of a debtor who receives a loan he cannot repay, “the lender… let him go and forgave him the loan.” “When that debtor had left, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount. He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, ‘Pay back…
“Jesus took Peter, James, and his brother, John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them… and his clothes became white as light” The heroes of ancient days made themselves gods; Sumer’s god-king Gilgamesh, Iran’s god-king Mazda, Egypt’s god-king Pharaoh. Ancient Israel’s deity says to their god-king…