DISQUS

Thom · 1 year ago

I enjoyed this quote. The paradox of death and life plays out fully in the cross: the death of the Messiah brings life to the whole world, the death of a Jewish Messiah brings forth a King for all nations, the death of the Second Adam leads not to a lineage of sin and pain but to abundant life.

Thanks for the comment on ThomTurner.com Make sure to check out http://www.everydayliturgy.com as well.

David · 1 year ago

thanks thom. i'm suddenly struck by the depth of that death and life motif. it's scary that we can take such a penetrating victory (that even overcomes death) and turn it into a promise of shallow gratification and proof that we are right and someone else is wrong. thanks for sharing your thoughts. i'll definitely check out that site.

adam king / sabbatical™ · 1 year ago

And the funny thing about this is that it seems like a lot of Christians consign this future joy solely to the afterlife, becoming suspicious of anyone who tries to make these things happen here on earth. Case in point: humans living in harmony with the environment and animals, respect and harmony among people groups, swords being beaten into plowshears, our full creative capacity being set loose, etc. Our Christian utopia looks a lot like the hippie utopia some Christians seem happy to malign. That always puzzled me. Sure, the world around us is ultimately impermanent in nature and things will change a lot, but whatever happened to redeeming the moments, redeeming the culture, redeeming the world around us, and redeeming the body—in addition to redeeming the soul? Seems like sometimes everything except the soul is deemed not worth time from the "spiritual" point of view, when God himself was the one who called all this material reality "good" and made us it's caretakers (at least according to the Bible—but who cares to read that anyway when I can read Falwell / Rob Bell instead.)

David · 1 year ago

for sure, adam. It's so easy for us to ignore the fact that jesus repeatedly talks about an inbreaking of the future kingdom NOW. "the future has invaded the present" (david bosch)