“DAILY” DEVOTIONAL-Listening
for the Spirit
Every once in a while I go
back and re-read Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth. It may not be the
best book on Jesus ever written. It was published in 1956, the year I started
preaching, and good books with more recent knowledge come out all the time. But
it was my seminary class book, and it opened my eyes to Jesus as more than a
character in hymns. Reading it again is like talking with an old friend.
The thing I don’t have to
re-read to remember is what Bornkamm said about Jesus allowing us to live in
the present.
In Jesus’ day, all the
folks were fixated either on the past or on the future—the traditionalists who
wanted to restore the glory of Israel, and those who thought only of the
afterlife. Both groups wasted their real, now lives, trying to live in a
different time. The salvation of Jesus was, at least in part, from the tyranny
of the past and the future.
This is a hard, hard time
to live in right now. It’s tempting to retreat into the past or the future. But
it was hard living in Jesus’ place and time, too. He wasn’t being starry-eyed.
He knew that people would kill him for living in the present. That’s a
dangerous place to live. But by living in the present, he managed to live
forever.
“THIS is the day that the
Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
JRMcF
“Don’t wait for the storm
to end. It might not. Learn to dance in the rain.” Helen’s favorite saying
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