background 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...

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,...

The world of Jesus was not the Old Testament Hebrew world. Like the United States now, Israel was multicultural, including a combination of Aramaic, Greek, and Roman influences. The people looked Jewi...

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 knew his spiritual journey depended on responsiveness to God’s invitations. Although his job was the most crucial in human history, Jesus did not get compulsive, preoccupied or unable to practic...

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...

Origen, in the third century, had a great analogy. He told of a village with a huge statue—so immense you couldn’t see exactly what it was supposed to represent. Finally, someone miniaturized the stat...

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...

In the midst of a busy schedule of activities—healing suffering people, casting out devils, responding to impatient disciples, traveling from town to town, and preaching from synagogue to synagogue—we...

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...