Quotes about Jesus

As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.

getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.

The need to explain Jesus as both surprise ending and deeply connected to Israel's story drove the Gospel writers to do some creative reading. Sticking to what the Bible says wasn't their goal. Talking about Jesus was.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

Paul doesn't call followers of Jesus "Christians." He calls them "in Christ." That isn't the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That intimacy also includes—somehow—suffering.

Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, gives us access to the Creator to reveal hidden things and invites us to seek out our sacred responsibility to perceive God's unscripted presence here and now.

Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel's story.

Here is another strategy for the sentence completion exercise: Sure, Jesus talks about loving your enemies, but Jesus also talks about throwing sinners into hell to burn forever. Since eternal damnation is far worse than exterminating merely one ancient people for their land, the argument goes, don't get all worked up about the Canaanites. Crisis averted. No, it's not.

Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it's an owner's manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the words on the page of the Bible don't drive the story, Jesus does. Jesus is bigger than the Bible. For

We should feel free to see a tension in Paul's thinking, a paradox as I mentioned earlier: what God has done in Jesus is deeply connected to Israel's story while at the same time breaking out of the confines of that story. As soon as we try to resolve that paradox in Paul we will misunderstand him.

To see what Paul sees, Christians today are summoned to join Paul: the reality of Jesus demands that the Old Testament be read not by the book, but against the grain.

All this is to say that a faith in a living God that is preoccupied with certainty is sin, for it compromises the gospel—personally, locally, and globally. But it need not remain so. As Jesus said to the adulterous woman, "Go your way, and from now on do not sin again" (John 8:11).