Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.
As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.
Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It’s only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide.
Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.
When Jesus’s followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn’t tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.
I have never been to India and I am not a specialist on Indian culture, and I would not wish to be heard to be taking swipes at a culture which I’ve never experienced and where I’ve never lived.
But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?
If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God’s love, take another look at Jesus dying on the cross.
What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is differentthe End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah.
The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.
The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.
Scripture is, at its heart, the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through, the story that in turn becomes part of us.
Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life after death,’ or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death’
I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
Part of Christian belief is to find out what’s true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.
True worship doesn’t keep looking at its watch.
Indian leaders are saying, “You don’t understand our caste system. It’s really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on.” I don’t think that’s quite fair.
Christ’s resurrection doesn’t mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus’s lordship over the world.
I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God’s own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us ans new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.
I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: If not us, then who? And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?