“The revelation of Jesus Christ…” (Rev. 1:1) I loath assembling box furniture. So many parts. Screws, nuts, bolts, furniture pieces (that are, of course, very very fragile), tools, sitting on the floor, legs falling asleep in a space that’s not...
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. — Matthew 1:1 It’s not by accident that Matthew’s Gospel is the first of four in the New Testament. This is by design. The book of Matthew—as the first book of the New...
Part of Christ’s priestly role is to tend the lampstands. The OT priest would trim the lamps, remove the wick and old oil, refill the lamps with fresh oil, and relight those that had gone out. Likewise, Christ tends the ecclesial lampstands by...
I mentioned in this post that the Bible compares Jesus and the Church to a married couple. I noted that the points of comparison between the two are deep love and commitment (self-sacrificing love and commitment). This isn’t the only metaphor the...
Surprisingly, the Kingdom of God isn’t mentioned much these days in the church. It’s surprising because it’s the one thing that Jesus talked about most often. Jesus’s life and ministry were shaped around the concept of the Kingdom of God and...
No one simply stumbles onto Jesus. There are always signposts to Jesus. There is always someone (or something) pointing the way to Jesus. We see this in the birth narrative of Jesus. For the Maggi, it’s the star. Even the cosmos point the way...
This is a warning that this post is a bit more academic. Read at your own risk! Living in Haiti has forced me to develop a deeper theology of suffering. Suffering has been at the center of my thinking for the past number of years and has become the...
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” (The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society...
Freedom is a theme that runs through Christianity. But what is freedom for the Christian? The strongest teaching of freedom that we find in the Bible is freedom from the shame and guilt of sin. Christianity espouses that every human being is born in...
The beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount have always intrigued me. For one, when I first read them they seem so simple, but the more I reflect on them at a greater depth, more complex contours begin to appear. Blessed are the poor in spirit Why...