Marvelous evocative things. People around Jesus saw and heard marvelous things and were overcome with astonishment. They saw and heard evocative things but were not overcome with understanding. Their failure or unwillingness to grasp what was happening had me wonder why as I memorized the first seven chapters of Mark’s gospel account.
Scripture begins by telling an old story and ends by retelling the old story with a new and final outcome. Both narratives involve chaos and creation.
Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.
James, steeped in Jewish wisdom-traditions, knows that wisdom belongs to the very nature of God himself. He knows that wisdom comes to man only as a divine gift. He writes telling readers to ask for the divine gift of wisdom by faith.
It would be quite easy to glide into a religious pluralism and end up worshipping the vaunted images of the world – “Great is Ephesian Artemis!” – and not the reality of the Son of God. One would thus end up having a form of godliness but denying its power. Neither John the Elder nor I want anything to do with such people.
“What’s up with God?” This question has been posed in various forms throughout history, often in the context of the problem of evil.
Have you tried out claims that promise a change for the better and then found that they fall short of their ballyhooed benefits? Have you tried, say, using tooth whitening strips and gels and find that your teeth didn’t whiten as advertised? Did you lose the weight promised through a much-hyped weight reduction program? Has…
At the cross. At the burial. At the empty tomb. Three wait-and-see days. Three women. The gospel according to Mark begins with the ushering in of “the good news of Jesus the Messiah, God’s son” (Mk. 1:1). Composed of short narratives that could be easily visualized by those who heard its reading, Mark’s terse and…
