Quotes about Jesus

If Luke and John were simply constructing narratives to combat Doceticism, they surely shot themselves in the foot with both barrels when they spoke of Jesus appearing through locked doors, disappearing again, sometimes being recognized, sometimes not, and finally ascending into heaven

God's kingdom" in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming "on earth as it is in heaven.

First, we break bread and drink wine together, telling the story of Jesus and his death, because Jesus knew that this set of actions would explain the meaning of his death in a way that nothing else--no theories, no clever ideas--could ever do.

resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.

Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the mode of knowing that is necessary if we are to live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't.

The good news that Jesus announced, like the good news that his first followers announced about him, was not a piece of advice, however good. It was about something that had happened, about something that would happen as a result, and about the new moment between those two, the moment in which people were in fact living, whether they realized it or not.

New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. "The ruler of this world" has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus's triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the

So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus's good news was about heaven coming to earth.

The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation. Now

Conspiracy theories were thriving in the first century, just as they are today. Jesus pushes them aside. Stay calm, he says, and trust in me.

Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath.

The only reason the death of Jesus was ever thought of as good news was because of what happened next.