Passover was the greatest pilgrimage festival for 1st century Jews, Jerusalem was packed with people (like for a world cup – only more crowded 😉 celebrating the great liberation from foreign oppression that God worked for Moses and the ancestors in Exodus. No wonder the Romans were jumpy, no wonder the Sadducees on the Sanhedrin [&hellip...
Gospels are not biographies, nor are they just collections of sayings, they focus on Jesus’ death and resurrection. Without either event can’t understand Jesus or the gospel. But we also to see and understand that Jesus is God incarnate and that Jesus is risen else his dearth and the disciples turnaround between end of gospels [&hellip...
In Matt 26 when Peter was supposed to be praying with Jesus he went to sleep, here a similar physical need interrupts his prayer, he’s hungry (in Peter’s retelling says he fell asleep here too 🙂 But God uses the two situations quite differently – here his hunger gives him a vision! When God says… [&hellip...
Luke begins his sequel to the gospel “In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning… but his summary ocuses on the resurrection and stresses that it was real. He then reports the risen Jesus telling the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the Spirit, who he [&hellip...
What’s a little miracle among friends? Yet Jesus seems to avoid performing one that would have saved his friends great pain, only to perform a greater one! And then there’s the ominous clouds gathering that by the end of the chapter foretell the storm to follow. Noticing some detail of how John tells this great [&hellip...
For this podcast I won’t deal with all the interesting questions about multiple demon possession, or even demons in pigs, but will focus on the beginning (and location) and especially the end of the story because they tell us why this story was remembered (though actually the pigs and the multiple demons do make it [&hellip...
Notice the opening – beginnings are often important – and in this case that importance is highlighted when the theme is repeated, that’s another clue – we repeat things that matter! The man born blind is a great character, do enjoy listening to him “naively” running rings round the clever religious scholars 🙂 So, it’s [&hellip...
As it does in Luke, Matthew’s account the feeding of the 5,000 follows after Herod speculating that Jesus is John come back to life, but Matthew used this opportunity to tell the gruesome story of John’s death. Luke moved quickly from John’s death, to tell of the disciples’ successful mission, whereas Matthew tell us that [&hellip...
The miracle stories in the Gospels (like the ones in the OT) are stories with the wow factor that’s part of all miracle stories – think of the ones we hear on the infomercials on TV 😉 They called this reading “Feeding the Five Thousand” but it comes in a context. Luke (like the other [&hellip...
Everyone loves a good miracle story, the Infomercials are full of them, buy this exercise machine use it just 10 minutes a day and be instantly sexually attractive, sleep on our special magnets and your pain will go away and you’ll feel 30 years younger. Infomercial miracles sell things: it worked for me, you buy [&hellip...
