Daily Liturgy and Scripture

Do you get the feeling that those around Jesus were unimpressed with him? It even seems that the seemed to think that knowing who he was made him too plain. Still, in the midst of this, there are still those who believed him. The miracles he had performed pointed to a world that was not their own, and the Kingdom was breaking through without Jesus being a showman.

As Jesus begins to fulfill the purpose for which he became God incarnate, he realizes that timing is important. He has been no stranger to controversy, and he sees how his brand of strange Kingdom is disruptive to the religious leaders. He will unveil everything at the appropriate time, but nothing can happen outside God's arrangement. All that was happening was prophesied before and the plan was...

Jesus saying he was the bread of life really caused a stir, so he doubled down. He was God, and what he said was God speaking. What choice could we have but to consume it so deeply that we are consuming Jesus himself, God in flesh? It was too much for some, because they deserted him.

Jesus producing bread for people to eat may have seemed like a parallel to the manna God provided his people in the wilderness, but that's not quite true: it's Jesus himself. Those who got distracted by the miracles Jesus performed were missing the point, that the miracles point to the giving of abundant life from the God of plenty.

Jesus is about making a Kingdom in an unusual way. When he is about to be thrust into power, he disappears. When people are in need, he is there again. He doesn’t come to promote himself, but to unveil the God who has been present with his people since the beginning of time.

Who Jesus is matters, and he goes into a few reasons to believe in this verse. For something to be verified as true, it required two witnesses. Who did Jesus  have? Both John and God the Father. Believing that he was the Savior was crucial in Jesus's day and remains so today.

As Jesus talks about his closeness to God the Father, we begin to see something a little more clearly: Jesus looks like God, because he is God. God has always looked like Jesus, and that's some pretty good news. As Jesus was defined by his love and compassion, so must God the Father look something like that as well.

In this week of Epiphany, we are fortunate to have two more great examples of people outside the Jewish world who come into the story of Jesus. The woman at the well becomes the first non-Jewish evangelist, and the royal official from Cana becomes the recipient of a miracle. Jesus had certainly come as part of God completing the promise to Abraham, but Jesus didn't limit himself to the Jewish nati...

Here on the day after Epiphany, when we remembered non-Jews who came to Jesus after his birth, it is a great follow-up to come back to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. The Samaritans lived in a land that was once part of the Jewish nation, but broke away and then got gutted by the Assyrians. Still, many in that northern area wished to worship God, but Jerusalem remained the place of worship ac...

Epiphany is a reminder that though Jesus came to the Jews, he was not only the Savior of the Jews. He is here for us all. Worship is also not reserved for the Jews, but for anyone who will come.

What kind of Kingdom has guys who show up and then purposely humble themselves? Those who understand that there is something more at work than the egos of men. God’s purposes are not ours, but when we understand God’s purpose, it can transform our own. So it was with John in his yielding to the Saviour.

Nicodemus may have come in the night as a sign of respect to Jesus, as opposed to debating him in the open market as some of the Jewish leaders had been known to do. Whatever his intentions, Jesus certainly gave him plenty to think about. The impression was deep, because Nicodemus would later assist Joseph of Arimathea in preparing Jesus's body for burial.

Jesus certainly did not come as a dour, lifeless person. He came to bring joy, and making wine for a wedding is certainly a great example of that. Of course, being the author of life, that wine was also going to be the best! That is the way Jesus works: life to the fullest, more than we could have imagined.

Just as God did not make Eden to exist without the fellowship of people, so Jesus did not come to be a one-man show. He called disciples, ordinary men who would play an important role in his ministry. This is kind of a wacky thing for God to do, including us. But there’s Jesus, God made man, walking among men, sharing the Kingdom by calling regular guys like Peter and Andrew to join him.

The Gospel of John was the last gospel written, and John starts with an agenda: Jesus was God, part of the Trinity from the beginning. As we also read Genesis 1 today, particularly the plural way that God refers to God’s self (in “our” image), we remember that Jesus was always God remains God, and was God from the beginning.

When I read about Jesus with the travelers to Emmaus, I love his playful approach. “What things?” he asks, as if he didn’t know what was going on. It is also appropriate that their eyes are opened when he breaks bread, because that is where we come to meet Christ to this day. Tables and fellowship are not just for friends out to dinner, but for us to commune with God.

It is fitting, here at the dying of an old year, to remember the resurrection that Jesus brings. He did not do this to show off, but to show us more deeply what he came to establish: a Kingdom not of this world, which death cannot stop. That does sound a little hard to believe if you don't have the benefit of reading the end of the story, so let's cut Peter a little slack. Probably many of us, if...

It seems appropriate that, as Jesus came to the place of crucifixion, someone helped him carry his cross. He had entered our world in the arms of person (Mary), he had been announced by another (John), and he was leaving his ministry in the uncertain hands of a group of men (the apostles). Now in his death, another man steps forward as God once again brings mankind into the center of his plan.

Jesus’s very innocence makes Pilate himself feel convicted. Under intense pressure from the religious powers, he eventually caves. Not, of course, before trying every way possible to get out of making the call to crucify him. Of course, Jesus was on a path set down since the beginning of the earth, and Pilate was playing a central role.

As Jesus heads through the trial which will determine his fate, he is faced with the question of his divinity. It’s strange that, even now, he doesn’t overtly say that he is the Son of God. Instead, he falls back on the statements about him by others, even his enemies. They have affirmed who he is, but in this dark hour, his disciples have still failed to recognize it.

The discussion of swords at the end of Saturday's passage and in today's passage seems really odd, doesn't it? Why does Jesus do that? He tells his disciples to get swords, but only two. Surely Jesus must have known that two swords were far less than they might need to defend themselves against a group of armed men. And perhaps that was the point: Jesus would not bring his Kingdom at the point of...

Christ is born! The coming of God as a vulnerable child is revolutionary and a little bit insane. The creator of the universe, taking on the form of a creation. Wrapped and laid in an animal trough, the Son of God unveils what God is like, and it is nothing like we imagined. 

As Jesus approaches the time of the cross, he continues to build a vision for a different kind of Kingdom. In this scene from the Passover, that gets flipped back to him. Passover was a time of suffering brought by God in the time of Exodus, but now Jesus becomes the one who will suffer. Just as the suffering of the Passover story is flipping upside down, so is the rest of the Kingdom: pursuing po...

Why is Jesus talking so much about the destruction of the Temple? One reason is that what he is describing is actually going to happen within the lifetimes of many who are listening. He is also inaugurating a new Kingdom, and it’s important for his followers to know that this building isn’t the central foundation of that Kingdom, but Jesus is. Even with the Temple is gone, his new Kingdom will rem...

Jesus has been building a picture of the present and future Kingdom that he brings, and this picture would have been startling: in the resurrection, the bond we have with God is so complete that marriage is no longer relevant. For those in happy marriages, this might seem like bad news. Imagine a loving God, though, and that a loving God would not change something so huge if the thing that replace...