Category: Jesus
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98. The Raising of Lazarus: Part 2
June 2021 Mulling on the stories of Jesus Resurrection appearances in all four Gospels a number of themes emerged: [1] Those who go looking for the dead body of Jesus don’t find Him. [2] They mostly find its absence frightening. [3] The Risen Jesus appears unexpectedly to others who were not looking for Him, although often they don’t…
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97. The Raising of Lazarus: Part 1
June2021 I marked Easter this year by mulling on the Resurrection stories in the Gospels, and found myself led from those in John’s Gospel to John’s account of the raising of Lazarus, where I was struck by both the similarities and the differences between the stories of Jesus’ Resurrection and that of Lazarus. We see a…
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70. The Lords Prayer
July 2019 The Gospels have two versions of the Lords Prayer, one in Luke and the other in Matthew. It is interesting to see them together, when it becomes clear that Luke’s version is shorter than Matthew’s. Luke 11:2-4 Father Hallowed be your name Your kingdom come Give us each day our daily bread And…
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69. Following Jesus
June 2019 I’ve been thinking about the Beatitudes recently. Luke’s version sounds simpler and thus more original. ‘Blessed are the poor, the hungry and those who weep’. After his baptism we are told that Jesus was led into the wilderness for a time. He must have been poor: there’s no indication in the Gospels that he ever…
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68. The Spiritual experience of Jesus
June 2019 I have been mulling for some time about Jesus spiritual life. I do so as someone who tries to take my own spiritual life seriously, and who often finds himself in conversation with others about theirs. My assumption is that Jesus’ spiritual life must have been much like ours. Thus I assume that…
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67. Cosmic Christ/Human Jesus
June 2019 This year alongside my Bible reading I have also been using ‘The World Religions Bible’ edited by Robert van de Weyer. It contains readings from a dozen faith traditions, one for each month. I’m only half way through but already it is obvious that there is a great deal of common ground in…
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66. Recognising the Risen Christ today
June 2019 I’m attempting here to join the dots and link a number of things I’ve written about. When we talk about Jesus we need to know which ‘face’ of Jesus we are talking about. Is it Jesus the man from Nazareth? Is it the Risen Lord? Or is it the Cosmic Christ? In a sense they are…
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63. Why did Jesus need to repent?
February 2019 I recently attended a church service, where the Gospel reading was the story of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan river. The preacher noted that John proclaimed that his baptism was a sign of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and, in passing, commented that because Jesus was without sin he would…
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48. The Cosmic Christ
October 2017 I’d like to share some thoughts arising from the Cosmic Christ of Whom I wrote in ‘Which Jesus’. John in the opening chapter of his Gospel writes of Jesus as the Word of God Who ‘was with God at the beginning, through Whom all things came to be; without Him no created being came…
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44. Which Jesus….a further thought
September 2017 I have mostly found the idea of The Trinity quite easy to understand. As I think of it, it contains three aspects of the same thing. This is not an unfamiliar concept: I am one person, but everybody who encounters me will encounter a slightly different face, and some quite different faces. The…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 