John

As I came to the first student and his family, kneeling with outstretched hands, suddenly someone took out a phone and snapped a picture.

As I came to the first student and his family, kneeling with outstretched hands, suddenly someone took out a phone and snapped a picture.

The Jesus that John shows us in this week’s Gospel text is not a religious robot, unemotionally prepared to end it all for the cause. He sees the risks, feels them.

The Jesus that John shows us in this week’s Gospel text is not a religious robot, unemotionally prepared to end it all for the cause. He sees the risks, feels them.

In this week’s Gospel reading, Jesus speaks of dark and light—one of our most primary realities and symbols. How can this be vivid language today, when we can turn the switch and flood almost any place with light any time?

In this week’s Gospel reading, Jesus speaks of dark and light—one of our most primary realities and symbols. How can this be vivid language today, when we can turn the switch and flood almost any place with light any time?

The binary world of John’s Gospel is well drawn in Jesus’ talk here. How could a God of love condemn people? What does it mean to be in darkness?

It’s hard to deny these little echoes of the synoptics which John reshapes for his own dramatic purposes. It seems narratively wrong for Jesus to cleanse the temple at the beginning of his ministry rather than at the climactic end. It makes more sense if one hears Luke in the background ever so slightly—Jesus’ claiming of the temple as his father’s house and his identity as the Son. Here in John, he has just performed a miracle at his mother’s behest, bringing spirit into the most fleshly event of human life. Now he goes to what is supposedly a spiritual place and finds only flesh. No wonder he is annoyed.

When the disciples try to explain Jesus’ wrath, they quote Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” John neglects to include the verse just before it, however.

One time at a women’s retreat, I was asked to tell my call story. I told this woman the whole, convoluted story—about serving as a missionary in Japan, about being restless in my work and volunteering for leadership roles in my church, about discovering old journals where I had written about my desire to study theology, about my memory of sitting in church as a teenager and hearing the pastor give the sermon and saying, “If I was a man, that is what I would want to do.” I told her that it had taken me a long time, but I finally realized that God was calling me to be a pastor.

She was not impressed.

The story goes that God got a body. I’ve often pondered the relationship between incarnation and pain.

Of the four kinds of love, affection is most linked to place. It arises among those who share a common life not by choice but by circumstance.

Of the four kinds of love, affection is most linked to place. It arises among those who share a common life not by choice but by circumstance.

Here in rural Georgia, it's hard to miss a monk in saffron robes walking through Wal-Mart. But we don't know what to think about him, so we don't.

One of my favorite confessions of sin is from a short poem called "Thread," by Dan Chiasson. "I am frayed where it would be highly useful," he writes, "to make a point."

Many people, perhaps most, are at least vaguely aware of one of the consequences of human sin.