Quotes about Jesus

We expect God to be, as we might say, 'in charge': taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of 'being in charge' would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples' feet.

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).

have argued that the early Christian view of Jesus's death was focused on Passover and hence on the Exodus story, now to be experienced as the new liberating event that was also the great one-off "sin-forgiving" event. Though the language here is unique to this passage, the outline meaning—Passover and atonement, in fulfillment of the covenant and to forgive sins and cleanse from impurity—is the same.

New creation can happen because the power of the satan, of Babylon, of Pharaoh has been broken. That is how the story works. That is what is different by six o'clock on the evening of Good Friday, though Jesus's followers don't realize it until the third day, which is the first day of the new week, the start of the new world.

All of this suggests that Mark's gospel, with Jesus himself as the great Character who stands behind it, is inviting us to something not so much like rule-keeping on the one hand or following our own dreams on the other, but a way of being human

As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers' belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross—and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection—makes sense.

Jesus, the Son of God, the truly human one, is leading his people to their promised land, and is available for all people and for all time as the totally sympathetic one, the priest through whom they can come to God. Following Jesus is the only way to go.

to go urgently around, with minimum hindrances or distractions, warning people that the world is heading rapidly in the wrong direction, and doing things which show clearly that evil has been defeated through Jesus and can be defeated again today.

About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.

God's kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus's life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul's mission.

Sunday, kept as a commemoration of Easter ever since that event itself (a quite remarkable phenomenon when you come to think about it), is not simply a legacy of Victorian values but a perpetual sign, joyfully renewed week by week, that all time belongs to God and stands under the renewing lordship of Jesus Christ.4

Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did. But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?