Quotes about Jesus

On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death.

A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?

The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But—often with tears in their eyes—they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love.

Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything? Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.

Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated.

Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.