Nonviolence requires training. It requires the humility to take correction from someone you can trust to see your shadow better than you do. It also requires you to forgive yourself when you give in to the violence crouching at the door, and keep at it. Don’t give up on nonviolence.
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But Easter invites us to a radical new perspective. What has to die? Everything! Our roles, our identities, all of who we believe we are, personally, culturally, socially, even spiritually. It all has to go!
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Paul’s interpretation of who Jesus was probably never crossed paths with the later gospel writers. Or, if it did, most of his theology was misunderstood.
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Matthew 16:13-28; Romans 6:5-11 This commentary is going directly through Matthew without regard for the traditional Christian liturgical year, so will not skip to the end of the gospel to Jesus’ “great commission” to “make followers of …
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Harold Camping says that the rapture described in 1 Thessalonias 4 will occur on May 21, 2011, and that God will destroy the entire Universe on October 21, 2011. Unlike John the Baptist and Jesus, Camping offers no chance for salvation.
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Sea Raven juxtaposes recent military events with the Gospel to make an eye-opening point about the cost of retributive justice.
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Jesus is seriously dead. None of the rest of it makes any sense otherwise.
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The possibility that Jesus’s message was one of radical fairness, and that following Jesus means creating and living in a world based on non-violent covenant instead of desperate selfishness, has certainly been hidden from view since before Luke decided to tell the story. It’s time to give the presidents and prime ministers of today the chance to see and hear the alternatives to imperial, retributive, business-as-usual. It’s time to offer viable alternatives to the feel-good, prosperity-based, exclusive, self-righteousness that passes for evangelism on the right. As liberal pundit Keith Olbermann has suggested, it’s time for some non-violent democratic action.
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Luke’s Jesus seems to be saying, pay attention to how you are listening to the message. Are you receptive (fertile); rocky (rejecting); thorny (resisting); or dry (uninterested)? Because . . . but here the non-sequitur called “to have and have not” throws us off the track. The Jesus Seminar scholars suggest that “Luke presumably wants the reader to know that those who grasp at the initial stages of faith will be given more to understand as they mature” (The Five Gospels p. 307).
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Poems from an upcoming book by Bruce Sanguin. Author of Emerging Church and Darwin, Divinity, and The Dance of the Cosmos.
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