Quotes about Jesus

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

His analysis here is the subsequent reflection of one who has come to believe that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah.

Only in the light of Jesus can he look back and see not only that the God-given Torah had the effect of increasing "Sin," but that this was the divine intention all along.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

Follow me, Jesus said to the first disciples; because in him the living God was doing a new thing, and the list of 'wonderful news' is part of his invitation, part of his summons, part of his way of saying that God is at work in a fresh way and the this is what it looks like. Jesus is beginning a new era for God's people and God's world.

What, in particular, might it mean to say that 'as Jesus was to Israel, so the Church should be for the world'?

Jesus's way of life is the path of self-giving love

When Paul talks in his letters about 'the gospel', he doesn't primarily mean 'the way you too can get saved'. He means 'the message that says that Jesus, the crucified and risen one, is the Lord of the whole world'.

The idea that "suffering is good for you, therefore you need to put up with the conditions we are laying upon you" is at best callous and patronizing. At worst it is unpardonable and abusive. Jesus himself, warning that suffering was bound to come, pronounced a solemn woe on the person through whom it came (Matt. 18:7). Life will throw quite enough problems at us without the church adding more while telling us sanctimoniously that it's good for us.

What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else. If we are not careful, we will offer merely a "hope" that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth.

Follow me, Jesus said to the first disciples; because in him the living God was doing a new thing, and this list of 'wonderful news' is part of his invitation, part of his summons, part of his way of saying that God is at work in a fresh way and that this is what it looks like. Jesus is beginning a new era for God's people and God's world.

We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.