Malcolm Gladwell, The Hebrews Author, & Picking an NFL QB

Last week I was at the beach with the fam and got some great reading in. Funny how that wasn't happening just a couple years ago with really little kids. But at ages six, four, & two I'm able to squeeze a page in here and there in between squeezing out sun screen for my pasty-white-skinned kids.

One book I read was "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell. If you've never read anything by Gladwell, you should check him out. He brilliantly ties together random people and social trends and shows how seemingly un-related things are connected.

For example, in one of the essays in "What the Dog Saw" Gladwell draws a parallel between how hard it is to identify good teachers coming out of college with drafting a pro quarterback into the NFL. The wash-out rate is high in both cases, and all the education and profiling in the world can't guarantee success in either endeavor.

The trick with Gladwell is to come along and enjoy the ride. If you over-analyze or object to every little thing, you'll miss the music of it. One reviewer said, "he's like a...many-armed Hindu god of anecdotes; he plucks them from every field of human endeavor."

The New Testament book of Hebrews is one of the most mysterious and opaque books of the Bible. In my first serious reading of it just after college I about gave up on making any sense of it.

But as I began to get more familiar with the Old Testament, I began to see things a little more clearly in Hebrews.

The author of Hebrews (no one knows who it is, but it's certainly not Paul) is like Malcolm Gladwell. He plucks stories and illustrations from the history of Israel with reckless and joyful abandon. He eagerly gathers up bits and pieces from the stories that would have been familiar to his audience and shows how Jesus fulfills all of it.

And just as Gladwell doesn't bother to spell out the rules of football in his piece about quarterbacks and teachers, neither does the author of Hebrews take too much effort to try to get 21st Century Americans up to speed on all his allusions and metaphors.

Much of the New Testament has bits and pieces of this. But Hebrews takes it to another, dizzying level. And if you can buckle up and enjoy the ride (and spend a little time digging into what the heck he's talking about), it's spectacular.

Tomorrow, I'll drill down into one particular exquisite example of this that's captured my imagination recently. But in the mean time, for some very insightful thoughts on the book of Hebrews, check out my friend Steve Tamayo's blog as he's working through Hebrews.

Dangers of Unitarians with Play-Doh, Stepfordizing God, and the Importance of "No"

I recall one woman who shared about growing up in a Unitarian Church. In Sunday School one week the teacher handed all the kindergartners in the class some Play-Doh and said, "Make God."

"That was the moment," she said, "that I knew something was wrong with all of this--even at the age of 4, I knew that making God out of Play-Doh just wasn't right."

With last week's thoughts still buzzing in my head about the necessity of a Jesus that ticks us off, I was listening something by Tim Keller. He suggested an even further function of bumping up against God's "no:" intimacy.

There was a book in the early 70's called "The Stepford Wives." The men in the community were slaughtering their wives and turning them into robots: yes, dear, was their basic disposition.

These men didn't want wives. They didn't want intimacy. They just wanted someone to boss around. Something to be used rather than engaged with.

Keller suggested that all of us would love to have a God who wants to share life with us intimately. But we also have this desire to "Stepford God" our God. Part of us wants us God made of Play-Do because we don't like a God that says to us: "no."

And we don't like a Bible that says to us "no." We'd prefer to do what Thomas Jefferson did: break out the white-out (or whatever he had back then) and choose for ourselves which part of Scripture is "real Scripture" and which parts we'd rather not deal with.

But apart from a "no," there is no way to get to intimacy. To have intimacy at any level, even our own self, is to engage in a relationship where "no" and "yes" are regularly exchanged. If there is no room for "no" then there is no room in our hearts for a real relationship with a real God.

We are, in the end, conflicted creatures--about all our relationships, God included. Our deepest longing is to be known and loved and yet it takes much more courage than any of us has to enter into relationships of true knowing and loving.

But God refuses to let us lobotomize him. He loves us too much to allow us to do so. He is not a God made by us out of Play-Doh. He will not simply agree with our every whim--whims which we imagine are self-generated but are more often products of our gene pool and personal history mixed with our most recent exposure to friends, enemies, and commercials .

And so he gives us Scriptures which we will push-back on. And he tells us "no" regularly. And we wrestle and engage and fight back. This is our prescription for health. There is no other way to true intimacy.

Why Jesus Should Tick You Off

The first temptation recorded includes the delusion that haunts all of humanity in any historical record, religious or otherwise: "you will be like God." Much of the record of human misery can be traced to people believing this lie.

One particularly subtle way this temptation works itself out is with Christians and Jesus. Jesus is such a full, colorful, and vibrant personality that any personality type can find something about him to support their natural bent.

For example, if you're prone towards self-righteousness there's Jesus cleansing the temple. See that, God hates evil--just like me! We should, too! Let's go clear out everyone from our church that's sinning like Jesus did!

And if you're a nice, kind, gentle pleasant-type, there's Jesus calling us to turn the other cheek! See that, Jesus is a nice person who accepts everyone and would never condemn or put limits on anyone--just like me! Let's just love everyone like Jesus did!

One thing that's kicking my butt as I'm spending the summer looking through Jesus' questions in the gospels is the variety and range of tone and type of questions. Sometimes his questions are gentle and kind and inviting. Sometimes his questions seem aggressive and rude and angry.

I'm inclined to make Jesus into my own image just like the rest of us. There's parts about Jesus that I intuitively like. That's as it should be. But there's parts about Jesus that I honestly struggle with or just don't like at first. And that, too, is as it should be.

If Jesus is anything like God, he is not us. And we need to be corrected by what needs correcting in us.

If we're paying attention to Jesus, he should tick us off. If he hasn't ticked you off at all recently, you might want to make sure that you haven't slouched into a selective Jesus made in your own image.

What To Do With Irrelevant Passages of Scripture

Recently I've been having a lot of conversations about the Bible--particularly about what to do on the days when you read something that doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything in your life.

For sure, there are lots of parts of Scripture that seem to have little bearing on the burning or presenting issues of our every day lives. How does the succession of kings in Old Testament Israel relate to a stressful day in cube-world, a week crammed with exams, or raising kids?

It can seem at times like these that reading the Scriptures is really just a giant exercise in time-wasting. But I want to propose that there's a gift here if we can position ourselves to receive it.

Part of our problem as humans is that we are all-engrossed in ourselves and our stories. This is only natural, this side of the fall, but it has disastrous consequences. Our worlds revolve around us, our dreams revolve around us, our lives revolve around us. And so our perspective is small and skewed.

And so when we're in particularly stressful or boring or laborious seasons of our lives, we get consumed with the tyranny of the urgent. I need something right now, right away, because me and my world is all that I have. And if my world stinks, then I'm up the creek.

Enter irrelevant passages of Scripture. The gift of these passages is this: they remind us that there's a bigger story than our own. They invite us to enter into a larger story of redemption and healing and transformation that has absolutely nothing to do with us and everything to do with God.

Being put back in our place is a large part of becoming healthy human beings. If we can learn to submit ourselves and our stories even and especially to seemingly irrelevant passages of Scripture, it can give us the gift of perspective.

If we can learn the discipline of simple receiving, of a simple, gracious, humble embracing of these odd or awkward passages of Scripture, they can in turn give us a tremendous gift. They can put the stress of cube world, the frenetic-ness of exam week, or the relentlessness of raising kids into perspective.

So read these passages for what they are. Don't try to force application if there isn't one there, but try to understand whatever significance there might be in the people, conflicts, truths or sides of God that are available. Offer that up to God. Thank him that the Scripture isn't about you but about him.

Ask him to use this passage that has seemingly no application to your every day life to help you remember that it really is all about him and not about you. And ask for help to believe that this is good news. Our stories are not the last word on us. God's story is the last word on us. This really is the best possible gift God can give us.

And it can be a particularly good gift when you read a passage of Scripture that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the much larger truth that all your days, even the most obscure days of your days, are invited to be a part of God's redemptive story of love, grace, truth and transformation.

Overcoming Prayer Shame and Scripture Befuddlement: Praying the Scriptures

So my job means that I talk about religious stuff with people. A lot. And when it comes to prayer, what I find is nearly universal shame: no one thinks that they pray enough or that they pray well.

And when it comes to reading the Scriptures, there's nearly universal befuddlement. Few are reading the Scriptures as regularly as they feel that they should, no one feels like they get as much out of it as they could. Many languish trying to figure out what to read and more importantly how to apply it to their lives.

Over the past several weeks I've re-discovered a discipline that has re-energized my time in Scripture and my prayer life: praying the Scriptures.

The basic premise is simple: as you read, you are open to something that seems significant in the passage or at least significant to you about the passage. This could be a word, a phrase, or an idea.

Then, as a part of sinking roots deep into this word, phrase or idea, you take that portion of Scripture and use it as the lens through which you pray for people you love, situations you're involved in, and whatever else you'd normally pray/think/worry about.

For example, I'm reading through Proverbs right now. One morning last week I came across this phrase: whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life and honor.

First, I need to make sure I understand the passage. Proverbs isn't a book about hard and fast promises. It's about general principles. I'm not cashing in an "if-then" promise. Proverbs is giving me an education in the goal of life and basic ideas about how to get there, what kind of person God desires for me to be.

So, I'm intrigued by finding life and honor--these are recurring words throughout the book that describe having found "it." And so I back up: pursuing righteousness and kindness often bears this kind of fruit.

So I pray through the lens of pursuing righteousness and kindness. First, I pray for myself, that the pursuit of righteousness and kindness would mark my character, my husbanding and fathering, and ministry and friendships.

Then I pray for my kids--that their lives might be marked by pursuing righteousness and kindness. That I'd be faithful to live out and articulate the values of both righteousness and kindness.

I pray that my kids will be surrounded by friends who also do this at every stage of their lives--peers and community are so critical for healthy spirituality. And I pray that they'd one day marry someone who also is marked by the pursuit of righteousness and kindness.

Then I go on--praying for the pursuit of righteousness and kindness and the fruit that comes with it to make and mark my co-workers, students leaders, our InterVarsity community.

And finally I pray for those on campus who don't know Jesus, that all the pursuits that shape the lives of students now might be replaced by this pursuit of righteousness and kindness--that in the end they would know the life and honor found in Jesus Christ.

And ultimately, all praying the Scriptures points back to this: that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the Scriptures. Righteousness and kindness aren't disembodied ideas--they have put on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. All righteousness and kindness is found in him.

Ultimately in praying the Scriptures, I'm running all the threads of my various prayers through the needle's-eye of Jesus Christ. In him is all the fullness of all the blessings offered to us in the Scriptures.

If you're someone who struggles with praying and/or Scripture-reading, I'd encourage you to give this a shot. It's helped me to drill down deeper both into the Scriptures and into prayer...relieving shame and befuddlement in one fell swoop!

What I Do with Old Testament Genocide

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading the OT book of Joshua. One major part of the book that (rightly, I think) disturbed me and others who read Joshua is the command from God to utterly wipe out the indigenous people in the promised land. Including the kids.

What do we do with these passages that seem to qualify as genocide? I don't think that there are easy or pat answers, but these are some things that help me as I wrestle through these passages:

1. If historically we've erred on the side of "might makes right," our 21st Century Western sensibilities have swung in the equal and opposite direction: we tend to romanticize indigenous peoples. Or to re-work the above statement: "to have been oppressed makes right."

Some of this is a good and healthy corrective. Clearly the history of western colonization and oppression is something that needs to be repented of. Indigenous people and cultures have been wiped out in arrogance and pride.

But in at least one case, the Hittites, God had spoken in an earlier passage of judgment on them that would be passed when they had fulfilled "the full measure of their sins." In other words, just as Israel was carried off into captivity by the Babylonians as discipline, so too for the Hittites.

Some of these people were doing things like child sacrifices, not just sitting around playing nicely with one another, innocently minding their own business when mean Israelites came and slaughtered them.

This doesn't deal with all our possible questions, we don't know what the other people were like, but it is indicative that there's more going on here than we know.

2. Jonah helps me. Jonah, if you recall from the recesses of your Sunday school class, is an Israelite prophet sent to Ninevah. This is unique in that nearly all the other prophets that we have record for are sent to Israel, not to other peoples.

So what we have is one example of God sending his prophet to non-Yahweh following peoples. This is at least indicative of God's heart for those outside of Israel.

Again, some of this is guesswork, but the reality is that there may have been many more Jonah-types out there, sent by God to other peoples to call them to repentance, just as Jonah was.

What we have in the Scriptures is the story of God's primary work in the world in and through Israel. What other things God was up to in the world, we do not know. We have hints and allegations, enough to know that while Israel is the primary means for God's blessing the world, it's not the only place where he's moving.

Who knows but that the Hittites and all the other people in the promised land didn't have prophets who went before the Israelites, calling the people to repent?

At the very least, the story of Rahab helping the Israelites (and thus being spared) in Joshua helps us to see that God's saving activity was active in at least one of the families in the city.

3. Lastly, I look at Jesus. Do I see, in him, judgment, righteous anger, the stern warnings to repent and the threat of certain destruction and/or death if his warnings are not heeded? Yes, yes, and yes. Jesus talks about hell more than anyone else in the Bible.

So judgment is not foreign to God. Nor is mercy and grace, which triumphs over judgment, seen supremely in Christ.

But this is not a case of "angry God" in the OT and "nice Jesus" in the NT. That's too flat of a charicature that does not do justice to the mercy of God exhibited in the OT or the full picture of Jesus that we get in the gospels.

Like I said, this doesn't answer all our questions, but it helps me to at least grapple with some integrity and honesty before the Lord.

Catalyst #1: Inerrancy

Catalyst #1: The word "inerrancy" as it pertains to the Bible is "the wrong word at the wrong time, though it might have been the right word for a previous generation."

Huzzah!
The word "inerrancy" is a twentieth century construct created as push-back against 19th and 20th century Biblical criticism attacks. It is a word foisted upon the Scriptures that the original authors in their context would not have considered useful or important.

To wit: Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible. It is almost exclusively a celebration of the wonders and power of God's word. The word "inerrancy" is no where to be found. It's not in the OT, not in the NT.

A number of years ago I was walking past a fellow campus minister who I personally liked a good deal. He was counseling a student through their questions about the Bible. I overheard him say, "The thing about the Bible is that it is either 100% right or 100% wrong."

This, my friends, is ridiculous. All you need to do is look in your NIV footnotes where it says, "some manuscripts omit the word it." It is exactly this foolish all-or-nothing reasoning that caused UNC professor Bart Ehrman to chuck his faith over a very minor historical detail in Mark and become the lead prophet for the new atheism movement of the past several years.

So what we end up doing is making up ridiculous definitions for what we mean by "inerrancy" that have so many loopholes and qualifiers that the word itself has no more meaning.

I really like how InterVarsity has navigated these waters. Our doctrinal statement says that Scripture is uniquely authoritative. Amen to that.

The Danger
Of course, the danger is that if you chuck "inerrancy" then people just chuck the Bible entirely. Or maybe the reader becomes the locus of power or authority to decide what's "really God's inspired word" and what's not. Fair enough, there are dangers there.

But on the whole, I will take an intentionally developed and cultivated "uniquely authoritative" approach to the Scriptures over a very post-modern, revisionist, made-up, bastardized version of the word "inerrancy" any day.

The Verdict
This is a good movement not just for the Emergent church, but a more faithful way for all of us to take the Bible seriously as it really is.

You to Ya'll

One of the challenges that we have in reading Scripture as western white folks is that we tend to read anything that says "you" as "me"--an individual.

But in the culture that the Scripture was written, the corporate you was the default understanding. It was a culture full of people who understood their identity to be much more deeply tied to the corporate community (and the specific geography, for that matter)--family, town, synagogue were much more prominent in the self-understanding of the times.

As a result, we miss the rich corporate nature of the Biblical story that is tacit and implicit in the narrative. And, as a result, our "applications" of our Scripture readings are understood as a private, personal affair rather than something that implicates all of us who are in this together. I am accountable to not only these Scriptures but to my neighbor who is reading this in community along with me.

So try this next time you're reading your Bibles: put a "ya'll" in place of the "you" and see how that changes things...or maybe "you's guys" for those of you more north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oral Tradition in the New Testament

If I had come to the presentation this past Thursday when I was a student, I think I would have been looking for that one "silver bullet"--the irrefutable piece of evidence or idea that would convince everyone beyond a shadow of a doubt that the New Testament doc's were reliable.

Of course, that doesn't exist. That's why we have these conversations.

But there was a pretty compelling piece that Timothy Paul Jones presented last Thursday that I thought I'd pass along. In essence much of the conversation comes down to this question: can we trust that the oral tradition that was passed along about Jesus for many years before things were written down?

One issue that is regularly raised among New Testament critics is that the gospels circulated for many years before there were names attached to them. Then (the charge goes) in the second century in order to gain credibility and authority, they were randomly assigned names that were affiliated with people who had credibility and authority.

Dr. Jones countered that argument with a couple of important challenges. First, if you were going to start randomly assigning authors to the gospels, you'd pick more compelling and authoritative figures than Mark, Luke and Matthew. They're mostly bit-characters in the Biblical story. Peter and James and other apostles had more street cred than Mark and Luke and Matthew. John's the only one that you might fabricate, but the other three? A bit odd.

Secondly, the idea that the names assigned to the gospels were selected at random doesn't fit with the evidence. By the time the gospel manuscripts start surfacing with names attached to them, they are scattered across Italy, Egypt and Turkey. And here's what we find: every single copy of what we call Matthew has Matthew's name written across the top of it. If the early church was indeed just randomly assigning authorship at the very least we'd expect to find a difference in who's being credited as the author. But we don't. Every copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John has their names across the top, from Italy to Egypt to Turkey.

And so this not only lends credibility to the authorship being genuine but it also ties back into the reliability of the oral tradition. In a pre-literate culture, the primary way most people were oriented to their culture and history was through hearing their history, not reading it. And here we have a piece of concrete evidence that in this specific case of the authorship of the gospels, the oral tradition that went with each of the manuscripts across the Roman Empire for many years was extremely consistent--even when it might have been in the best interest of the powers-that-be to change the authorship to lend the manuscripts more credibility.

How the Right Questions Changed My Sunday

A couple days ago I posted on the importance of asking the right questions in the right order: Who is God? What does God do? Who are we? What are we to do? Apart from getting the answers to the first two questions at least partially correct, everything else spins out of control. I had an experience a couple days ago that underscored the importance of reading Scripture in just this way for me.

We only get the paper on Sundays. We have a hard time actually reading much of it the one day a week we do get it. The rest of the week I try to keep up with the news on-line.

In my cynicism I tend to think of the newspaper (and news media as a whole) as simply a mirror of our cultural anxieties, and this past Sunday was no exception. The front page had three major articles that weren't "time sensitive" in any way--they were analysis pieces rather than "this just happened yesterday" pieces. And there they were, our worst fears pronounced back to us in black-and-white. Terrorist cells regrouping (and Bush's inability to do anything about it), police who have sex on the job don't get fired, and the drought here in North Carolina is getting worse and worse.

I have to admit, as I scanned over the articles it was working. I was getting pretty anxious.

Over the past several months I've been reading Psalms over my breakfast in between refereeing my kids. Some mornings I get a more open-space for time in Scripture and prayer later on, other mornings, that's all I got.

Sunday morning I opened up my Bible to the "Psalm on deck" that I was to read that morning. And it said absolutely nothing about terrorist cells, crooked cops, or the water levels in the greater Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh area. And yet it said everything I needed to know about those things and more:

1 God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.

2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,

3 though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

8 Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.

9 He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.

10 "Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."

11 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
excerpted from Psalm 46

Who God is and what he does, is doing and has the power to do cast all the headlines of the day in sharp relief. Suddenly the world was not spinning on the wobbly axis of the day's anxieties but on the rock-solid character and sovereignty and power of a good and holy God.

That's some serious good news.

Jesus & Questions

The thing that has convinced me of the power of questions in living and leading is being in the gospels with Jesus. The dude asks the most profound, haunting questions that have stuck with me for hours, days, weeks, months, years.

Here are a few questions from Jesus that have lodged in my soul over the years and won't let me go:

Do you want to get well?
Who do you say that I am?
Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?
Who touched me?
Where have you laid him?
What do you want?
What is written in the law? How do you read it?

If you're someone who's never read the Bible or someone who's trying to figure out where to go in Scripture for yourself, here's a recommendation: read the gospel of John and let Jesus' questions go to work in your soul.

Asking the Right Questions

So what makes the leaders in any part of culture (industry, technology, education, politics, state fair foods) is not that they know all the right answers. What makes leaders leaders is that they ask the right questions. Ask the right questions and you are on the right path towards finding the right answers. Start by asking all the wrong questions and you can't help but go wrong.

The same thing is true of the Scriptures. I work a lot with students whose primary complaint about the Scriptures is that they don't get anything out of them. Nine times out of ten, that's because they're asking the wrong questions. Or perhaps asking the right questions in the wrong order.

Here's the four key questions that Scripture is interested in answering (in this order):

1. Who is God?
What is God like? What are the names he might be called? What is his essential nature, his essential character? What are his attributes?

2. What is God doing?
What's God doing in history? How has he already acted? How is he going to act? What does that tell us about what he might be up to right now? What does God's activity tell us about question number one--that is, what does his action reveal to us about his character?

3. Who are we?
Scripture has many different names for people: slaves, orphans, daughters, sons, beloved, dead, alive, saved, lost, broken, wounded, redeemed, rescued, blessed, holy, saints, sinners, and many, many more. What is our identity? Who are we?

4. What do we do?
So in light of all of these other things, how are we to respond? What's our next step? Where do we go from here?

It's critical to note that for most of us when we read the Scriptures we are interested in these questions in precisely the wrong order. Many of us go to Scriptures looking for guidance about what to do with our lives: take this job, marry this person, do this major, deal with this person who's bothering you, make this deal at the office. These are not bad things--we need guidance--but they are the least important things.

The Scriptures are obsessed with God. We are obsessed with ourselves. And so we read the Scriptures words of life and get nothing out of them because we are blinded by our self-absorption.

It is the infinite wisdom of God that he should be least interested in giving us answers to question number four. If the Scriptures were as obsessed about giving those answers as we were about finding them, we would be but empty shells of people. Apart from knowing who God is and how he's already and always acting throughout history and on our behalf, all of our doing is just rote obedience. Apart from knowing our identity as God's child, our activity is simply out of obligation or guilt.

It is less important that you know what to do with your life than that you know there's a God who loves you, is for you, and is sovereign over every step of your days. Under the umbrella of that sovereign grace, we can act freely, joyfully, gladly in the obedience we were made to offer, in the spirit with which we were made to offer it.

Scripture Seminar Eve

This week on campus we're kicking off a four-week seminar on Scripture. We're bringing in a local pastor to help students sort through the questions that are inevitably raised when operating in a context such as UNC, where Bible-bashing is both a science and an art form. Some of the issues raised are legitimate, some are pure conjecture or silly rantings of angry people.

But the problem for my students in their classes is that often the issues that are raised are discussed as if no thinking Christian has ever dealt with or thought about these questions before. There's problems with these texts, these professors say, end of story. No real opportunity for rebuttal.

So this is a crucial four weeks for us as I find many of my students, even from here in the Bible belt, struggle to trust the Bible as authoritative. Their favorite "out?" "I like Jesus, but I don't like/trust the rest of the New Testament." A couple reasons why this falls apart:

1. The story of Jesus was written down by his apostles and other followers. Jesus himself writes nothing down for us. To like or trust the Jesus of the New Testament is to trust the authors who have written those stories down for us. Luke writes another New Testament book (Acts) and John writes four other NT books (1, 2, 3, John and Revelation). Peter, a likely source for Mark, writes a couple books as well. It's all written down under the same authority. Either these guys are faithful reporters and interpreters of Jesus or they aren't. You don't get to pick and choose what you like and what you don't.

2. The only way that you can get warm-fuzzies from reading Jesus is to import a ton of the rest of the New Testament's interpretation of him into the gospels. Jesus never once utters the word "grace" in any of the four gospels. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, all the harshest and hardest words in the Bible come from Jesus. All the passages that give me the greatest hope for rescue and redemption both for me personally and for the rest of this world come from those who were with him who help to interpret both his life and actions.

My students who like Jesus in the gospels but are uncomfortable with the rest of the New Testament are able to do so only by buying into the lie that Jesus was a Teletubby. That's a complete neutering of the person and work of Christ. No one bothers to kill at Teletubby (except maybe Pat Robertson, but that's for another post altogether).

Jesus made folks angry, he speaks the most impossible commands and sets the most impossible standards. Afterwards, his disciples come along and help to interpret in full, after the cross and resurrection event, the purpose and meaning of Jesus words and work.

Thank goodness the New Testament is not solely Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Apart from the rest, we would be in quite dire straights, indeed. I only hope that these next four weeks on campus frees students up to receive the full blessing of the full canon of the Scriptures