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9ee8f6a
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Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.
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christianity
jesus
love
discipleship
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Brian Zahnd |
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cf77cdc
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The problem with our "change the world" rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance--things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live."
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Brian Zahnd |
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7a5db03
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Here in the second beatitude, Jesus is making an important announcement to those who, instead of finding a means of avoiding personal pain and shared sorrow, have allowed themselves to be sculpted by pain and sorrow. Jesus seems to be saying that it is those who have given up being comfortably numb through shallow contentment and have instead engaged in the real work of grief--for there is much in this world to grieve over--who are the ones..
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Brian Zahnd |
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f7aba18
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Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
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Brian Zahnd |
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6f2569d
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The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation. No one captures this idea better than G. K. Chesterton in the close of part one of his classic work, The Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had..
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Brian Zahnd |
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d586f5c
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Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus's ideas makes Christianity truly radical.
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Brian Zahnd |
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9406559
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War, as a legitimate means of shaping the world, died with Christ on Good Friday. Jesus refuted the war option when he told Peter to put up his sword. Killing in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the violent injustice of Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate would have been a just war--but Jesus refused to engage in a just war. He chose instead to bear witness to the truth, forgive, and die. Jesus took the death of a world framed by war ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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a61a913
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Jesus didn't seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners--tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin--the power brokers of religion and politics.
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Brian Zahnd |
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084ef9b
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It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.
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Brian Zahnd |
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0766744
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Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father's house.
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Brian Zahnd |
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b9b58ed
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we eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don't believe in Jesus's ideas of nonviolent resistance and enemy love at all.
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Brian Zahnd |
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ad2e8ec
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I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don't care. I've grown immune to their strain of unbelief. I've turned a corner. I believe that what Isaiah dreamed of, Jesus died for. I believe that what Isaiah said would come to pass in the last days, Jesus inaugurated in his resurrection. I've caught a glimp..
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Brian Zahnd |
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85af2fa
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What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God's love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin!
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Brian Zahnd |
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2a86499
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this--when we feel hurt, threatened, or angered by a person, people-group, opinion, or situation, we instinctively look through the lens of self-defense. It's like looking at something through the sights of a gun--it's a narrow perspective framed in fear and held in hostility. Such a perspective is certainly not the full or true perspective. But if we are dualistic, non-contemplative people, we will think of our highly limited perspective a..
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Brian Zahnd |
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921c9ff
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The resurrection is not only God's vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity's burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen..
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Brian Zahnd |
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36e22bf
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For people who are poor at being spiritual (which is most people), this announcement really is good news. But do you see how counterintuitive this is? The kingdom of God is coming on earth, and who would we think would be the first ones invited in? The religious. The devout. The observant. The ones rich in spirituality. The ones good at being spiritual. But that's not how Jesus issued the invitation, and it's not what happened. It was the s..
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Brian Zahnd |
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3895205
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Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.
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Brian Zahnd |
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a6f10a0
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If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.
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Brian Zahnd |
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5de15c8
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Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.
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Brian Zahnd |
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4d84c07
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The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.
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Brian Zahnd |
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1f8d34b
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The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas--thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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90ddbf5
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It was Jesus's ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn't very dangerous. It's been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the "gospel" today--a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die--Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in t..
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Brian Zahnd |
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6f8a81a
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Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cann..
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Brian Zahnd |
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be6ce01
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It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.
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Brian Zahnd |
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119b26c
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When I say it's hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it's hard to believe in Jesus's ideas--in his way of saving the world. For Christians it's not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity--all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That's not hard for us. What's hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It's hard because his ideas for running the world are ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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945a904
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One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what was originally intended in the Bible. Hell has become a catchall word for however we imagine eternal punishment in the afterlife. But the Bible doesn't talk near as much about the afterlife as we have imagined. A surprising thing about the Old T..
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Brian Zahnd |
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6c0aee8
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The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit ... because of how it feels.
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Brian Zahnd |
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f677e4c
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Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no "them;" there is only us."
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Brian Zahnd |
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9431c91
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Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.
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Brian Zahnd |
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255dd84
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Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information.
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Brian Zahnd |
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d7621e6
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on the first Palm Sunday. It happened a hundred and fifty years ago in America. It continues to happen today. If we think Jesus shares and endorses our disdain and enmity for our enemies, we don't know the things that make for peace, and we are headed for
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Brian Zahnd |
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32cbe77
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So when Jesus comes along and says to us, "Love your enemy," we instinctively feel how radical it is. He's not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the world! The world was founded on hating enemies, and now Jesus says, "Don't do it!" When Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek," he wasn't just trying to produce kinder, gentler people; he was trying to refound the world! Instead of retaliatory violen..
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Brian Zahnd |
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290a647
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American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans--the privileged citizens of the world's lone superpower--have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean peasants.
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Brian Zahnd |
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812676e
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This is not to suggest that Christ isn't the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God's good creation and God's original intent for human society.
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Brian Zahnd |
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79dd99a
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The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we're not shocked by the Beatitudes, it's only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality--and being sentimental about Jesus is the religious way of ignoring Jesus! Too often the Beatitudes are set aside into the category of "nice things that Jesus said that I don't really understand."
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Brian Zahnd |
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0474972
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It's true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, "Blessed are you who are poor"--period. (Luke 6:20) In Luke's Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of "in spirit" is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ's bl..
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Brian Zahnd |
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6e06e02
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If what we mean by "Jesus saves the world" gets reduced to "saved people go to heaven when they die," then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John"
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Brian Zahnd |
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cd014c9
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Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.
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Brian Zahnd |
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ebb78d5
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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed
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Brian Zahnd |
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7e7bbaa
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Not long ago I was in Istanbul, Turkey. While there I toured the Topkapi Palace--the former royal palace of the Ottoman sultans and center of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many artifacts collected throughout the centuries and on display was an item I found quite remarkable--the sword of the prophet Muhammad. There, under protective glass and illuminated by high-tech lighting, was the fourteen-hundred-year-old sword of the founder of Islam. ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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92fdcfc
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The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.
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Brian Zahnd |
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59ab903
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Feeling intimidated by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentalism takes a "scientific" approach to the Bible--which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture. The Bible is not interested in giving (or even competing with) scientific explanations. The Bible is working on a different project than scientific inquiry."
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Brian Zahnd |
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0000483
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The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.
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Brian Zahnd |
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fcf46e1
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I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.
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Brian Zahnd |