When Pilate interrogates Jesus, he sounds much like the disciples who thought the kingdom Jesus kept referring to was a political one. “Are you the king of the Jews?” he asks Jesus.
Jesus responds, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate points out that he is not Jewish and that Jesus’ own people have handed him over. “What have you done?” he asks.
What if we put children at the center of our policies and decisions?
He had been a stranger,
so took in strangers,
today three, and
in the heat of the day.
He interrupts my spinning
wool for his new cloak,
orders me to make a fire,
use my best meal
to make cakes
for heaven’s sake,
tells the servant boy
to slaughter that calf
I’ve had my eye on.
Of course I listened
behind our tent’s flap.
How else do we women
learn anything important?
How peculiar of them
to speak of a son
to such as we are,
such as I am who
Bruce Chilton moves Herod the Great and Herod Antipas from backdrop to center stage.
Fred Craddock once said words to this effect: that he knew some people could do without a notion of heaven, that eternal life in that sense was not a requirement for their understanding of the gospel, but he was not one of them. He believed, wanted and needed to believe, in heaven. Too much injustice, he as much as answered, before anyone had a chance to ask him why.
Five new books about Luke and Acts
The story of two grieving and economically insecure women is the hinge of the entire covenant history.