Hopewit

John 3 provides a concise, if enigmatic, summary of what has come to be the core of evangelical theology . Mankind is flesh, food, earthy. He is, by all accounts, an animal that is born, feeds reproduces, ages and dies. According to John, though, there is a possibility for more, and that more is hard to embrace because, like the wind, it comes and goes invisibly from and to wherever it will. It is therefore different from the material world that we sense on a daily basis and so it must be apprehended differently. The spirit comes to the one who believes, the one who is, as it were, born over again into a spiritual realm where all is new and different. Nicodemus apparently comes prepared to be inspired to something more than he has so far experienced as a mortal being; he recognizes in Jesus a teacher who possesses something more than life has offered him so far. He comes at night because the niceties of his formal life as a person of importance in the ruling class would...

John 2 is a short chapter – 5 minutes of reading tops. It relates only two incidents: the wedding at Cana where Jesus is purported to have turned water into wine and the cleansing of the temple, the latter appearing surprisingly at what would appear to be the beginning of his ministry; the other gospels place it near the end. I have occasionally quipped that if Jesus had been born into the Mennonite congregation of my youth, he would likely have arrived at such a wedding early and turned the wine there into water. Wine was objecta non grata at Eigenheim weddings . . . and still is. We could debate the significance of this miracle , and one is tempted to do so. John makes the points that his mother has confidence in his ability to help the host out of an embarrassing situation, that the jars Jesus had filled in order to produce the new wine were jars normally used for ritual cleansing, that the water-into-wine event “was the first of the signs through which he revea...

In my re-reading of the New Testament, I chose only 1 of the 3 synoptic gospels . I've tended to refer to Mark or Luke for “synopsis” gospel references for somewhat irrelevant reasons; my skipping of them this time is not significant. The first three gospels are called “synoptic” because they provide “synopses” of Christ's life including the same material . . . with some variation. John is different. John's gospel—to my mind—could be called the “analytic” gospel; it tells us what happened historically as well, but the writer seems to ask himself, “Yes, but what did it all mean?” more than the writers of the synoptics did. That's why the opening passage in John 1 reads almost like a philosophical treatise to me. In it, Christ is The Word, The Word is the truth of God: Christ, God and Creation are one. Christ (God, Creation) has come to us as a man for the purpose of shining the light on (teaching us to understand?) the unity of all that is, to br...

The 28 th Chapter wraps up Matthew's account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Although not disagreeing with the other gospels, his penchant for brevity means that details recorded elsewhere are left out here and only essentials are included. The primary essential to all the gospel writers, of course, is that Jesus' death was not the end, but a transition. In Matthew, we have the account of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary visiting the tomb and encountering angels who announce that the grave has given up Jesus' body and that he is now alive. Matthew's defense of the miraculous resurrection is one that might stand up in the court of public opinion, but doesn't pass the test of logic. “The Jews,” in Matthew, spread rumours and bribes to propagate the story that the disciples had spirited Jesus' body away, supposedly to make his disappearance seem a miraculous resurrection. To cause them to do this, two possi...

A birthday orchid on our window sill. The trial of Jesus before Roman Governor Pontius Pilate doesn't read like unfamiliar territory to those who watch the news. There are courtrooms where the rule of law takes precedence over the raw tramplings of power, where justice remains a real possibility for those who are accused. But there are courtrooms in our world where this is not the case. Reading Jesus' trial record in Matthew again can trigger a wide range of emotions and thoughts. One view might be that Jesus was obviously tried “unjustly” but that that doesn't really matter since he chose not to defend himself and had already predicted that this trial and its consequences would be part of an inevitable and necessary end. The lamb being led quietly to slaughter as a human sacrifice. A second attitude might be that this trial and its verdict model the depth of human weakness and depravity, that the scattering of the disciples, the ridiculing o...

A watercolour by friend Brian. Matthew 26 is a very long chapter and launches the crucial passion week; its narrative will be repeated world wide as churches observe the death and resurrection sequence. Matthew's gospel is exceedingly brief here as usual and discussions among the principals are reduced to a few sentences; the “preliminary trial” before the Sanhedrin could have taken five minutes if Matthew had actually been present and had been appointed court reporter. The long night in Gethsemane is reduced to three, single sentence prayers and the observation that try as they might, as serious as the situation was, the disciples couldn't stay awake. We sometimes make the point that four gospels are necessary because each writing was undertaken with a different focus, a different set of emphases in mind. So I ask myself, “What was Matthew particularly wanting the early church to know and remember for certain about the last days of Jesus' life?” ...

How many sleeps 'til lilacs bloom, huh? The apocalyptic vision of Matthew's Gospel continues in chapter 25. What the three stories there have in common is division of the righteous from the unrighteous at the second coming, the judgement and assignment of the judged to either eternal reward or punishment. Take the parable of the ten virgins: five foolish and five wise. Plenty of interpretations can be found on line including here , but most bog down by fitting the story laboriously into previously-held end-times views. They end up overworking the analogy, applying every detail to specific, present-day reality, neglecting the significance of the context in which it was spoken. If I've got it right, the hearers of the time would have visualized a Palestinian wedding with the groom coming to claim his bride followed by a procession back to the groom's family home for the celebration, the group's way lighted by bridesmaids—sort of—carrying lamps...

Colombian Orchid - courtesy Agnes Epp Rev. J.C. had charts on paper beside the pulpit. So many years from creation to the flood, so many years from the flood to Moses, so many years from . . . and so on. As a kid, it was just scary; we were nearing the end of time—the last event on the chart—when the saved would be caught up and I, probably, would be left behind with my impure thoughts! I learned later that this was only one interpretation of how the end times would unfold— dispensationalism —and that the whole subject of interpreting scriptures as regards the end of things is called eschatology . The disciples, of course, were eschatologists of a sort; they'd have to have been, given their raising in the synagogue, their knowledge of the prophets and the existence of the Book of Daniel. In Matthew 24, Jesus appears to be placing himself in the centre of the apocalyptic expectations already existing. It was an age of occupation, extreme violence and bloodsh...

Everybody wants to be somebody, sometime. Would you rather be the performer on the stage taking bows to a standing ovation or the man in the lobby of the theatre, wiping up the melted snow from the boots of the attendees with a big, fat mop and a dirty pail? Would you rather be the queen waving to her subjects from her carriage or the person who cleans up behind the horses in her stable? Chapter 23 is aimed straight at the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, not because they are not learned keepers of the texts of the Talmud and the Torah, but because their knowledge and actions don't match. It's their hypocrisy that's in focus, and hypocrisy's effects are felt in proportion to the power that the hypocrite holds. Who cares if the homeless man professes to be honest and then steals a toque from Walmart? But when our leaders preach justice, mercy and faithfulness and don't themselves practice it, what has anyone to learn from them? What be...

Life can get prickly. Chapter 22 begins with an allegory, a parable. I can't help but assign the part of the banquet invitees to Jesus' Jewish co-religionists of his time and place, the part of the host to Jesus himself. But then, every parable seems to have layers of meaning that I could be missing. God inviting, invitees drifting off instead to other things, to other religions, to the day-to-day could be said to be an —if not the —overall Biblical theme. The event to which all are invited is a banquet, a feast, a joyous meal with friends. Why anyone would forgo the invitation is amazing, so much so that their reluctance makes them “undeserving.” And so the invitation is thrown open to whoever out there in the streets is hungry and is willing to come in. If I'm reading the allegory correctly, Matthew is saying that if the original invitees are not willing to come to the feast, the door will be thrown open to the whole world instead. Here...

Nothing but |Leaves Palm Sunday is coming up in a few weeks. You can buy plastic palm branches, distribute them to the children and have them march up the aisles during a service singing “Hosanna, hosanna.” Possibly—if we were to update the story to Canada, 2015—it would be called Spruce Sunday and the branches would be cut down from our own spruce trees. I'm never sure what to make of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, a kind of rally/demonstration of Jesus' followers proclaiming him king and according him some ancient rituals of coronation. Somehow it seems out-of-joint considering the previous chapters where the horizontal kingdom gains so much emphasis. Did it make the papers? I wonder. Did Jerusalem actually notice? Did they have a demonstration permit? Matthew is telling the story; before he wrote it as a part of his gospel some decades after the event, it probably existed in the oral history of the growing church, possibly written down on scraps ...

A teaser for those who still know some German: discern the import of this old song! It's true. The Christian Church of which mine is one denomination proclaims itself to be guided first and foremost by the Word of God: the Bible. It's probably also true (arguably) that if early church fathers like Matthew, Mark or Luke, later ones that canonized and compiled the writings that we now call The Holy Bible had not done their work, that there would be no Christian Church, that my denomination would not exist. You could speculate similarly on the existence and growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without The Book of Mormon , or the Islamic religion without the Qu'ran . Some major religions, denominational gatherings thereof, are firmly anchored to holy books sometimes indistinguishable in portent from the idols before which other religions bow down. Their holy books are that central to many faiths. Maybe that's why the actual readi...