Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount unsettles many biblicist ways of understanding Scripture. It may even be better to move from speaking of ‘the Scriptures’ as a noun, to speaking of ‘Scripturing’ as a verb.
Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world. What would these metaphors have meant to his first hearers?
True worship has little to do with the ‘commodification’ of liturgy; it has everything to do with the performative embodiment of God’s redemptive narrative through justice, mercy and fidelity.
The call of Jesus to his disciples required a surrender of all they had previously understood their identities to be.
John the Baptist presents Jesus as the Lamb of God, an identification continued in the book of Revelation. Looking to the Lamb, rather than to the great and powerful Beasts, should inform our politics as Christians.
Biblical stories about baptism are connected to, but also at odds with, historical theology about baptism as well as the current liturgical practices of baptism. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism gives us a helpful window into the reality.
A competent sentinel must be vigilant, alert to and able to read the faintest signs upon a distant horizon, perceiving the most miniscule of details and discerning their greater import when they finally appear. In the opening chapters of both Matthew and Luke, we encounter a series of watchers and signs, presented in part as examples to the readers of the gospels in their own watching.
God who became one of us so inconspicuously is still walking among us, very quietly, making our lives special.
Transformation begins by inspiring—by breathing in—hope. Only then can we exhale justice. In ‘Immanuel’, God’s sign of hope for a desperate world, we find the means by which we can pursue justice.
The interconnected identities of Jesus and John the Baptist are a matter of speculation in the Gospel of Matthew. The truth is revealed through the fulfilment Old Testament prophecy and against the foil of the brutal rule of Herod.
The words that we use to describe ourselves and others are significant. John the Baptist’s description of the Pharisees and the Sadducees as a ‘Brood of Vipers’ lies at the heart of a powerful prophetic critique.