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In fact, some of us—and I say this with the empathy of someone who has heard students’ stories for two decades—had awful childhoods, and just thinking about God’s love is confusing, bewildering, and nearly incomprehensible.
Some of our heart openings are rusted shut because of the way our parents loved (or didn’t love) us. Those of us with this past need the reeducation of our hearts and a new vision of the beauty of God’s love taught by Jesus. What we need is the oil of Abba’s love to penetrate through our rusty heart openings,
Remember, Jesus is surrounded and is being asked why he eats with sinners. Jesus tells this story to justify his behavior. He justifies his love for others (the second part of the Jesus Creed) by appealing to an Abba who is the focus of the parable. And when we look at this parable carefully, we see that this Abba is surprisingly loving and gracious.
Knowing God’s love begins when we open our hearts to Abba’s love.
Another way to open up to Abba’s love is to repeat throughout the day a short prayer reminder: “Father, thank you for loving me.” The wisdom of short—sometimes called breath—prayers
Most obvious is the act of faith we may call self-talk: telling ourselves that God loves us. We can say: “God loves me. He loves me, especially me. He knows me, especially me. I am loved by God.”
Jesus’ table story: clean or unclean, you can eat with me, and I will make you clean. Instead of his table requiring purity, his table creates purity. Jesus chooses the table to be a place of grace. When the table becomes a place of grace, it begins to act. What does it do? It heals, it envisions, and it hopes.
via @scotmcknight
Worship happens when I comprehend (1) who I really am before God—a love-violating sinner, (2) how faithful and gracious God is to his sacred commitment of love for me, and (3) how incredibly good God is to open the floodgates of that love to me.
The Torah, so says Jesus, is a love-God-and-love-others Torah. Jesus is not against the Torah. He is against understanding it in such a way that its fundamental teachings about loving God and others are missed. The priest and Levite followed the letter of the Torah but failed in the spirit of the Torah.
Put differently, we are not called to the love of Torah but to the Torah of love.
But now that I know the story of Vincent van Gogh, I have come to value yellow differently. This famous Dutch painter, sadly, tossed away the truth imparted to him in his Christian home and sank into depression and destruction. By the grace of God, as he later began to embrace that truth again, his life took on hope, and he gave that hope color.
But by the time he painted The Raising of Lazarus, his life was on the mend as he began to face the truth about himself. The entire picture is (blindingly) bathed in yellow. In fact, van Gogh put his own face on Lazarus to express his own hope in the Resurrection.
To confess means that we tell God the truth.
When we tell God the truth and accept responsibility for who we are and what we’ve done, we find the Jordan to be a stream of living and forgiving and empowering water, a river that washes us so we can begin all over again.
Our reputation (what others think of us) is not as important as our identity (who we really are). Spiritual formation begins when we untangle reputation and identity, and when what God thinks of us is more important than what we think of ourselves or what others think of us.
Loving God, as the Jesus Creed teaches, involves surrendering ourselves to God in heart, soul, mind, strength—and reputation. The minute we turn exclusively to the Lord to find our true identity is the day reputation dies.
If conversion is likened to a birth certificate, we produce babies who need to be pushed around in strollers. If it is like a driver’s license, we produce adults who can operate on life’s pathways.
The question of when someone is converted is much less important than that they are converting.
His little book Letters by a Modern Mystic has sold nearly a million copies. Partly to his credit go the practice of “breath prayers” and the decision to live in the continual presence of God, which he had learned in seminary from Brother Lawrence.
Literally, the text says that John was “reclining in his bosom.” Now, it is a short step from this statement back to John’s statement about Jesus: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side.” Literally, this text says “who is in the bosom of the Father.” Put together, John’s own language suggests he thinks the love he experiences from Jesus is the same sort the Son experiences from the Father!
In Jesus’ day, the observant spoke of Torah-style as the “yoke of the Torah.” Some considered the Torah-yoke to be a source of joy. But the average Israelite frequently found the Torah-yoke to be anything but a joy; instead, he or she found it burdensome. The apostle Peter complained about this at a public convention about twenty years later.
He hallows the ordinary act of love, making it extraordinary. Instead of finding it in the majestic, Jesus sees God’s kingdom in the mundane. The kingdom of God is the transforming presence of God in ordinary humans who live out the Jesus Creed.
Jesus knows his society, characterized as it is by the Jesus Creed, is not compatible with violence.
It is quite easy to see the normal intent of Jesus’ healing miracles. Any glance at the many records of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospels reveals what the miracles normally do: They restore people. Miracles are performed by Jesus out of love and are done to restore humans to God and to others. Miracles are what happens when the Jesus Creed becomes restorative.
That joy did not come to him until he came to faith in Jesus Christ. Its presence and discovery surprised him, for it was not, in fact, joy that he was yearning for, after all. It was the Person to whom this joy was pointing all along. As Lewis himself explains his quest, “But what, in conclusion, of Joy? . . . To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.” Why? Because the joy Lewis found is only the effect of drinking the wine of Jesus—it is not the wine itself. Joy is a person, and his name is Jesus.
The goal of a disciple of Jesus is relationship, not perfection.
We cannot have a relationship with our christology—we can have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Our soteriology cannot save us from our sins—our Savior can. Our ecclesiology does not make us one—the Lord of the Church does. Our eschatology will not transform this flawed universe—Jesus the King of kings and Prince of Peace will do that. And, no matter how much we love theology—it will never love us back.
Humans, Jesus says, are defined not by their labor for him, as Martha thinks, but by their relationship to him, as Mary learns. Catherine Clark Kroeger, who has devoted her academic life to studying women in the early church, concludes in a sentence just shy of pure poetry that a woman in Jesus’ kingdom society “is not ultimately defined by the excellence of the table she spreads but on spreading her heart open to God’s Word.”
M. Robert Mulholland, Jr., has devoted his ministry (and life) to the spiritual reading of the Bible. He calls attention to the distinction between “informational” and “formational” reading of the Bible. The difference has to do with how we read the Bible and why we read the Bible. Either we read the Bible informationally (to learn more) or we read the Bible formationally (to be changed).
His suggestions to read formationally push us away from the yen to know and shift us to the yearning to become.
Here’s the simple white-flag prayer a disciple carries each day: “May your will be done.” The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple’s responsibility is to love God by following Jesus.
Genuine repentance, seen here, involves three more Rs: taking responsibility, making restitution when necessary and possible, and recommitment.
the 3 r's of repentance via @scotmcknight
When they throw themselves at Joseph’s feet, Joseph simply asks, “Am I in the place of God?” The Scripture continues, “And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.” This story is really the only instance in the Old Testament of humans forgiving one another.
And Schimmel observes a fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity when it comes to forgiveness: Judaism overall is more concerned with guaranteeing justice than with forgiving incorrigible sinners, whereas Christianity, at least in its foundational prayer and creeds, if not in its actions, talks more of forgiveness as an act of grace, given even to the undeserving and not-yet-repentant, than of justice. In what probably strikes Christians as a bit slender on mercy, Schimmel adds: We have to imitate God, and God, for the most part, punishes unrepentant sinners and forgives
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The Anglican leader and evangelist Michael Green cuts through church cant: “God’s church exists not for itself but for the benefit of those who are not yet members. . . . [and] the church which lives for itself will be sure to die by itself.” The church is not a religious club and it does not have a secular mission. Instead, it is a worshipping and sending community.
Reaching out to others is what happens when a person lives the Jesus Creed; that person loves others, and love means seeking God’s best for someone.
via @scotmcknight
Here’s the mystery of the Jesus Creed: Jesus both loves God and loves others for us and he summons us to love God and to love others.
If Jesus is to bring the kingdom to earth, as Tom Wright says, “this is how he must do it: by humbly identifying himself with God’s people, by taking their place, sharing their penitence, living their life and ultimately dying their death” and (I would add) being raised in their resurrection.
There is only one reason for Jesus to repent for us: We can’t repent adequately. An adequate repentance has four elements: a true perception of sin (conviction), telling the truth to God about sin (confession), the decision to change (commitment), and its demonstrable behaviors (consequences). Because we’ve already looked at the last two, we will look now at the first two.
Jesus is tempted in the wilderness for a reason: He must relive Israel’s wilderness tests and pass those tests, so he can enter into the Land as the obedient Israelite—and do so for us. Israel fails, and another generation enters the Land. Jesus succeeds, and he enters the Land with and for his own people.
We go through the process of being spiritually formed by participating in the life of Jesus, who lived the Jesus Creed perfectly. Jesus repents for us at the Jordan, he loves God faithfully in the wilderness when he is tempted, he transfigures earthly tragedy into eternal realities on the Mountain, and he transforms the Passover lamb into his own death for us at the Last Supper. Jesus’ living out the Creed also explains the cross: his love for God and for others direct his path from the Galilee to Golgotha.
These texts swallow an old story with a new story. The old story is that blood from the Passover lamb was smeared on the door to protect the firstborn and liberate Israel from slavery. The old story is about blood that sets a people free. The new story is that Jesus is the new Passover Lamb who is slain to ransom his people, to set them free. Instead of smearing blood on the door, Jesus’ followers are asked to ingest the wine (his bloody death) and trust in his blood as a protection that will set them free.
