Word: jesus
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...fact remains that the substance of Jesus' teaching is the basis on which many Christians establish their faith. Its piercing good sense, imaginative eloquence, the breathtaking stringency of his ethical demands and his simultaneous patience and compassion are crucial to the intimacy that so many establish with this long gone man. The promises he makes in the Gospel of John, in the resonant (and quite literal) King James translation, have strengthened endangered men and women from the terrors of Roman martyrdom till today--"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father...
...heart, the ethical teachings of Jesus are not markedly different from those of the earlier Jewish prophets, above all Isaiah. Jesus' emphasis on acceptance and mercy is especially strong, even to the point of demanding that his followers not resist evil. He insists that the unrepentant outlaws of the world will enter the reign of God before the righteous. Yet he demands that his hearers be "perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." His sense of the imminence of God's reign, and the change of heart it demands, is expressed in earlier Hebrew scripture, but only Jesus...
...Whatever Jesus' final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure...
...believer might point out, there is the chance that Jesus was right. Perhaps he was what he claimed to be--the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel. Since his Resurrection, he has become--in the minds of billions--a transnational Messiah who continues to care for individual humans and to save them from internal and external evil...
...radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself--an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church--transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus' disciples asleep around...