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18
Oct
2022
unday October 9, 2022
Could Jesus have been wrong? This is not a hypothetical question. It bears strongly on how we can – or should, or might – respond to a variety of current controversies.
Could Jesus be wrong? The mind boggles. Christian faith worldwide is founded on the conviction that Jesus must have been right, regardless.
Now, there are certainly things that Jesus said and did that stretch our credulity. Walking on water, for example. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. But we rationalize away that experimental failure, by arguing either that it’s a skill limited to the divine, or that it proves our lack of faith.
But then there are those troublesome parables.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Trump, Jesus, parables, wrong
28
Dec
2021
Thursday December 23, 2021
I call myself a Christian (though I’m sure some would consider me a humanist at best, an atheist at worst). Certainly, I come from a Christian tradition. And Christian tradition has asserted, for centuries, that God was born as a human baby. We call him Jesus. Other cultures call him Jesu, or Yeshua, or some name that I don’t know.
Think about the sheer audacity of that claim. God became human! God didn’t just pretend to become human. God didn’t put on a human mask and go around in disguise. God became a human. A very specific historical human.
The Incarnation makes my faith much simpler. If I want to know what God is like, I need only look at Jesus.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, Christmas, Jesus, Incarnation
2
2020
In the Okanagan Valley, summer winds are predictable. The south wind blows up the valley. The north wind blows down the valley -- “up” and “down” depending on how you orient a map, because a lake surface has no up or down.
In spring and fall, we also have west winds, which ride over the Coast Mountains and gather speed as they whoosh down the slopes to the lake.
They hit the lake like a physical punch. The lake reels. Its surface darkens. Waves form, long lines of foaming combers, marching in formation across the lake.
I’ve often wondered what’s happening at the front of the gust, at its intersection with the existing airflow.
Tags: Bible, Jesus, winds, Nicodemus, Okanagan
9
Apr
Today is Maundy Thursday.
Maundy? Probably not a word you run across often. “Maundy” apparently derives from Latin mandatum, meaning commandment.
Traditionally, today celebrates the last evening Jesus spent with his disciples. Where he took pita bread, or some equivalent, and tore it up, and told his disciples, “This bread is (like) my body (which will be) broken for your sakes.”
And he poured wine into their cups (today it would probably be Tim Hortons coffee), and said, more or less, “This is like blood. You need it to keep your strength up. Drink it, and remember me in tough times.”
Treat those as commands, and you have “Maundy”.
Tags: Jesus, Pilate, Maundy Thursday, washbasins
24
2018
Sometimes I hear people insist that Jesus was the Son of God, or God fully embodied as a human. And because God, to be God, must know everything, therefore Jesus must also have known everything. About everything. Including his own forthcoming death and resurrection.
Let’s play with that idea. Let’s imagine that we have a time machine. And we can go back 20 centuries, and listen to Jesus talking to the crowds that have come out to hear him.
He’s standing on a hilltop.
“You think that this rock I am standing on is solid,” he tells the crowd. “I tell you, this rock consists of billions of electrons and protons -- far tinier than a mustard seed -- which are not things at all, just positive and negative electrical charges, which you don’t know about yet, which can only be defined as probabilities. In fact, there is nothing under my feet, and nothing under you, except what you imagine is there.”
Fast forward a few decades. (Our time machine has split-screen capabilities.) The disciples are trying to reconstruct what Jesus taught them.
Tags: Jesus, time machine