Painting Fakes

It's Good Friday in two days, the day we commemorate Jesus' death.  At St Andrew's South Brisbane each year we have a series of meditations, and I'm responsible for one of them this year.  This meditation brings together three things.  The first is the chosen reading, from Matthew 26:46-68, which includes Jesus’ arrest in the garden and his sham trial before the High Priest Caiaphas. The second is the framework for this year's series, “Jesus the real King”.  In what sense is it possible to see Jesus as a king when he is so obviously powerless? The third is the religious thought of Leo Tolstoy .  Later in his life, after he had written his great novels, Tolstoy experienced a profound conversion.  He came to understand that following Jesus meant obeying his command to love our neighbours as ourselves, to do to others what we want them to do to us.  If we take this seriously, he says, we will not try to kill one another in war, we will not flog or impris

After looking at the Wisdom writings in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha , it happens that at church we've started a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount.  Last Sunday was the Beatitudes.  For once I'm not going to have a whinge, because it tied in very nicely with what I'd been thinking about the Wisdom books. As I mentioned, the Wisdom writers faced a problem.  Why do those who do wrong seem to prosper while those who do right suffer?  They had two answers.  The writer of Ecclesiastes advocated humble submission - we don't know what God is doing or thinking, all we can do is carry out the tasks he has given us and enjoy our life as we can.  The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon was more confident - the righteous may appear to die unrewarded, but God will reward them in the life to come. Jesus develops this theme further in the poem that begins the Sermon on the Mount, the eight lines we call the Beatitudes from the Latin term which means "blessed",

I'm preaching on June 2 - next Sunday.  Here's what I think I'll say. The main passage is from Luke 8:1-21, which includes the Parable of the Sower plus a couple of stories which reinforce its central message.  Supporting passages come from Isaiah 6:1-13 and 1Peter 1:17-25. The Parable of the Sower is one of those stories of Jesus that we learnt about in Sunday School, and it's unique in being the only one of Jesus' parables which comes with its own explanation attached.  This can mean we think we understand it.  However, I wonder if we really do get it's full message, or if our familiarity blinds us.  The story starts off with the parable itself. 4 When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: 5 ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture.

On Good Friday I gave a short meditation on two passages - the story of Jesus before Pilate as told in John 18 and 19, and for a bit of background the story of David's plan to build a temple from 1 Chronicles 17. David certainly had plenty of faults, but he is often protrayed as the archetypal King of the Jews, the man who first established them as a secure, powerful nation.  1 Chronicles 17 recounts how, after fighting various wars and establishing his kingdom securely, David had the notion to build a temple to Yahweh.  Even his household prophet Nathan thought it was a good idea.  Yahweh disagreed, and sent David a message.  The essence of it was that he didn't need a house, and if any house-building was to be done he, Yahweh, would do it.  He would establish Israel in their home, and build a house (that is, a dynasty) for David.  David was put firmly in his place.  He may have had a household prophet, but he didn't have a household God.  He served Yahweh, not the o

We often hear talk about "the magic of Christmas".  Usually it has something to do with elves and flying reindeer and Santa Claus breaking into your house through the ceiling vent.  However, we shouldn't forget that the original Christmas story (you know, the one with Jesus in it) also features magicians.  Here they are, in the NIV translation of Matthew 2. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” Herod consults with his scholars and suggests they try Bethlehem, then asks them to report back to him after they have found the child. After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they sa

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jesus' deeds show us about the Kin

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i

Speaking of reading ancient texts through modern eyes, that's the subject of my second post on miracles . For the past two centuries, people in Western countries have primarily seen the world through a "scientific" mindset strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.  We see the things that take place around us as products of impersonal natural forces, and when something takes place our first reaction is to seek a natural cause.  This makes it very difficult for us to believe in miracles, because we believe that they are not a "normal" part of the cosmos.  The natural is everyday, the supernatural is extraordinary. This mindset was behind the blossoming of the "rationalist" lives of Jesus which began to be written in the 18th and 19th centures, and which are still influential today.  These sought to explain Jesus' miracles in rational, scientific terms.  The feeding of the 5,000 was explained as an event in which Jesus shamed the rich into sharing

Lately it seems that a lot of conversations I have come around to the subject of miracles, and in particular Jesus' miracles, so I thought I'd write a short series of posts on the subject. For a lot of my Christian friends, Jesus' miracles are one of the most important pieces of evidence of his divinity.  His miracles are seen as showing the power of God expressed through him, and vindicate his claim to divinity as well as the reality of God.  For them, without the miracles there is no Christianity. Paradoxically, these same miracles are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many of my atheist friends.  One of the reasons they reject religion in general and Christianity in particular is that they find the idea of miracles impossible to believe.  As Crossan and Reed say, impossibility battles with uniqueness.  Both parties accept that miracles are highly improbable and that it would take something extraordinarily special to make one happen.  For the atheist, this

I was generally a bit lukewarm about John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus.   However, he did say something at got my attention. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" is one of those biblical phrases that has made its way into our wider culture.  This means that it is often taken out of its context, even by Christians.  Whenever I have heard a sermon or a discussion on this verse, it is taken to mean something like, "what's the point of riches and power if you are going to end up in hell?  It's better to believe in Jesus even if that means giving up these things."  There is of course a certain amount of truth in this but there is much more to the story than that. Here is the full passage it comes from, Mark 8:27-38 taken from the New International Version rather than the King James that you will most often hear quoted or misquoted. 27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages ar