luke on Jesus' Earthly Ministry

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything abo...

T. S. Eliot once described the current human endeavor as that of finding a system of order so perfect that we will not have to be good. The way of Jesus tells us, by contrast, that any number of syste...

The Child of glory,  The Child of Mary,  Born in the stable;  The King of all,  Who came to the wilderness  And in our stead suffered;  Happy they are counted  Who to Him are near. When He Himself sa...

Many of us may have wondered what types of prayers Jesus would have prayed during his time on planet earth. In his book Praying with the Church , Scot McKnight notes that Jesus and his disciples,...

Introduction Jesus is the deliverer of Israel (1:54–55, 69–75, 77–79) Jesus states his mission in Luke 4:16-19: to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to captives and the oppressed. The word ...

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...

Jesus needed, not once, but again and again at each stage of his mission and each crisis in his living and dying, a freshly confirmed knowledge of his own identity.

Introduction Jesus is the deliverer of Israel (1:54–55, 69–75, 77–79) Jesus states his mission in Luke 4:16-19: to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to captives and the oppressed. The word J...

Jesus cared that they were scared It was their fear that drew Him near He heard their cry He saw  that they were terrified So He came close He walked beside He got in He didn’t pass by And He sai...

‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, Such a dainty, fragile child, But the one we know is bold and strong We can hear that in your dying song, Little boy, little boy. ‘Just a boy of flesh and b...

Lord—You’re the God who notices. You notice a desperate woman who touches Your garments in a crowd. You notice a lonely, little tax-collector in a tree. You notice a blind man on the roadside, a widow...

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, M...

His poverty was so great that He was born in another man's house, and buried in another man's tomb.

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, M...

But it wasn’t just his new message that made Jesus irresistible. It was Jesus himself. People who were nothing like him liked him. And Jesus liked people who were nothing like him. Jesus invited unbel...

With a certain oversimplification we can trace easily enough the three options open to Jews in Jesus’ day. … First, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scr...

The gospels are earthy. People are close to the earth. They travel here and there by foot. They eat the live heads of grain growing from the soil as they walk through the fields. They get grubby and h...

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

Why did it disturb the religious leaders that Jesus ate with “sinners”? To eat with someone is an important symbol of fellowship. And in those days, the Jews had a rule: one is not to have such fellow...

In what sense, then, did Jesus declare that the Kingdom of God was present? Our answer must at least begin with His own answer to John: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf...