Jesus confuses Pontius Pilate.

Mark 15.1-5, Matthew 27.1-2, 11-14, Luke 23.1-4, John 18.28-38.

After the Judean senate held their perfectly legal trial and sentenced Jesus to death, the Law instructed ’em to take Jesus outside the city, hurl him off a cliff, and throw stones down on his body till he was quite dead. But because the Romans had taken over Judea 27 years before, the Romans didn’t permit ’em to execute anyone. Only Romans were permitted the death penalty. So the Romans would have to kill Jesus for them.

This meant the Judean leaders had to convince Pontius Pilate, the Roman prætor—the military governor (Greek ἡγεμών/igemón, “ruler”) of Jerusalem—that it was in Rome’s best interests to execute Jesus. The prætor wasn’t just gonna execute anybody the Judeans recommended. Especially over stuff the Romans didn’t consider capital crimes, like blasphemy against a god the Romans didn’t understand, or honestly, respect. So what’d the Judeans have on Jesus?

Simple: He declared himself Messiah. Did it right in front of everybody.

Mark 14.61-64 NLT

61BThen the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

62Jesus said, “I AM. And you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God’s right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

63Then the high priest tore his clothing to show his horror and said, “Why do we need other witnesses? 64You have all heard his blasphemy. What is your verdict?”

“Guilty!” they all cried. “He deserves to die!”

Messiah (i.e. Christ) means “the anointed,” and since you only anointed kings, it straight-up means king. Jesus publicly declared himself Israel’s king. That, the Romans would consider treason: The king of Judea was Cæsar Tiberius Divi Augusti, princeps (“first citizen”) of Rome. Cæsar would have a vested interest in putting any antikings to death. So that was the charge the senate brought with them, and Jesus, to the Roman prætor.

The senators hauled Jesus to Antonia, a fort Herod 1 had built next to the temple (and named for his patron, Marcus Antonius) so soldiers could observe the Judeans in temple… just in case any riots broke out in there. The senators then presented their unrecognized true king to Pilate.

Mark 15.1 KWL

Next, in the morning, the head priests,

consulting with the elders, scribes, and the whole senate,

carry and deliver the bound Jesus

to Pontius Pilate.

Matthew 27.1-2 KWL

1As it became morning, all the head priests and people’s elders

gather in council regarding Jesus,

and how they’d put him to death.

2Binding him, they lead Jesus away

and hand him off to Pontius Pilate, the leader.

Luke 23.1-2 KWL

1Getting up, the crowd leads him to Pontius Pilate.

2They begin to accuse Jesus,

saying, “We find this man twisting our nation,

preventing taxes to be given to Cæsar,

calling himself ‘Christ’—which means king.”

In all the gospels, Pilate questioned Jesus… and came away unconvinced this man was any threat to Rome whatsoever. As Luke and John tell it, he didn’t even believe Jesus was guilty of anything. But the Judean senate wanted Jesus dead, and got plenty of the locals to say so too. In the end, Pontius pragmatically gave ’em what they wanted.

What is it with Christians and fascism?

CHRISTOFASCISM 'krɪs.toʊ'fæ.ʃɪz.əm noun. A politically conservative, authoritarian, nationalistic ideology, which claims to be based on Christian principles.

[Christofascist adjective.]

Back in high school history class, we were introduced to the word “fascism,” but as I recall my history teachers had the darnedest time trying to explain what it was. I suspect it’s because they didn’t wanna offend any conservative parents who might lean a little fascist.

Properly, fascism is the movement led by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s. It’s not based on any particular political ideas, because Mussolini wasn’t an ideas guy; he was a populist. He just wanted to get elected, claimed he’d make Italy great again, and planned to do it by bypassing democracy and the usual checks and balances used to keep dictators from seizing power. The Italians called him il Duce, “the Duke,” because he tried to run the country much like a medieval duke—or one of the early Roman emperors, whom he used as his examples.

The few traits fascists and fascist governments have in common is they’re

• AUTHORITARIAN. The leader tends to act like an absolute monarch, tries to suppress his political foes and hold on to power, and tries to control everything in the country—regardless of existing laws and customs, and even civil rights. (Habeas corpus especially.)
• CONSERVATIVE. Fascist regimes are always anti-Communist, and anti anything they claim to be Communist, like unions and labor laws and government oversight. Always claim to uphold traditional values and standards… and always claim God’s on their side. Often go out of their way to look devout—mainly to help cover up how much they don’t act it.
• NATIONALISTIC. By “nation” they mean the largest ethnic group in the land, so yeah, we’re talking racism. Every other ethnic group is cast as “the problem,” and need to be enslaved, mitigated, deported, or eliminated.

The reason fascism was so widespread in the 1930s, and why it’s returned in such a big way in the 2020s, is because it taps into human nature so very well. People are inherently selfish. We want God to grant us all our selfish desires, Jm 4.3 and if God won’t grant it, maybe this fascist politician will. We want government to grant it, and if a democratic government can’t achieve it through negotiation and compromise, a fascist government can do it through steamrolling all our opponents.

And because fascists recognize that the biggest potential obstacle to their thirst for power is the one to whom we’re meant to grant all power—Christ Jesus—they go out of their way to make Christians believe, “No, really, Jesus is on my side. I’m doing this stuff for him. He approves. Lookit all the sinners I’m going to persecute on his behalf!” Historically they’ve been very successful at this, because obviously Christians don’t know our own Lord well enough to recognize this pursuit and elevation of temporal power, to do our will and claim it’s really Jesus’s, is obviously the spirit of antichrist.

Atonement: God wants to save everybody!

Humanity’s sins have significantly damaged our relationship with God. But not irreperably. God can fix anything. And he did.

As most of us know from the times other people have sinned against us, some of the time we can simply, easily forgive those sins… and sometimes it’s not that simple. Some sins are mighty destructive. When we wrongly destroy something, it oughta be replaced, but that’s not always easy to do. If you destroy something with a lot of sentimental value attached to it, a simple replacement isn’t gonna cut it. If you destroy family photos, sometimes they’re not replaceable. Same deal when you wrongly kill someone: It’s kinda impossible for us to replace them. God could do it, but we certainly can’t.

So when people ask me, “Well can’t God just forgive all our sins, and that’s that?”—it’s not gonna be that easy. Our sins do damage. We don’t always see or care about all the spiritual damage, but it’s there. God can see it, even though we can’t. So God can’t just forgive us; he’s gotta do damage control. He’s gotta fix things.

That’s what atonement is: God’s act of fixing sin-damage.

That’s what it means whenever we try to atone for evil we’ve done: When we try to fix sin-damage… with various degrees of success. We don’t always succeed. Some of our acts of atonement are actually kinda pathetic. Like when a corporation offers people money to make up for harm they’ve done—and it’s always too little money, unless the courts get invovled and make ’em pay something gargantuan.

The Hebrew words for atonement are כֹּפֶר/kofér, כִּפֻּר/kippúr (which you know from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, “day of atonement”), and its related verb כָּפַר/kafár. It literally means “plaster.” You know, like when somebody knocked a hole in a wall. You put some plaster or putty or spackle or cement on it, paint over it… and if you applied the filler properly, the wall’s as good as new. Sometimes better than new, ’cause your plaster is stronger than the drywall you’ve patched. And that’s the word the LORD uses in Exodus to describe what the ancient Hebrews’ ritual sacrifices represented to him: Their sins poked holes in their relationship with God, and needed plastering. It’s a really simple metaphor: Sin breaks stuff, and atonement glues it back together.

The word English-speakers used to use to describe kofér, and its Greek translation ἱλασμός/ilasmós, was “propitiation.” It’s still found in the King James Version Ro 3.25, 1Jn 2.2, 4.10 and comes from the Latin verb propitio, “to appease; to regain the good favor of.” It sorta misses the point of kofér—and of grace. Thanks to God’s grace, we already have his good favor; he already considers us right with him. But sin-damage still needs to be dealt with. We still need to make things right in the universe. God’s just fine—a fact which many Christians still don’t wholly grasp (and occasionally send me rebuking emails to complain I’m making God sound too radically gracious, as if that’s possible) ’cause we still struggle to fathom how deep and wide God’s love and grace is.

Anyway, there used to be a Middle English word, “onement,” which means unity. John Wycliffe used it in Ezekiel 37.17. English-speaking preachers started to use the prefix “at-” with it, meaning in, to describe our relationship with God: We’re in unity with him. Supposedly atoning acts bring us back to this state of unity… but remember, God does grace, so we don’t need to do these atoning acts.

Because Christ Jesus already did the atoning act: He sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. Cl 1.22, 1Pe 1.19 He took care of it. We need do nothing more than accept that he took care of it. We can’t add to it; we’re not good enough to sacrifice ourselves for anything more than our own sins.

Since Jesus is God, it makes God himself our plaster. We have him patching the cracks that sin made in our lives—in much the same way the Holy Spirit was sealed to us when we first turned to God. But don’t play with that metaphor too much, lest you get the idea it’s okay to poke holes in your life so God can putty them with more of himself. We’re not meant to keep on sinning so we can get more grace. Ro 6.1-2 Instead look at your life as a wall full of holes, patched over by God. We might imagine it as flawed; we can’t get past the idea of all the holes beneath the paint. But God nonetheless considers it a perfectly good wall. It serves its purpose: It keeps out the wind and rain. It keeps prying eyes from looking through it. It keeps listening ears from hearing better through it. It provides shelter. We can hang pictures on it. And so on, till the metaphor breaks down and we just get silly. But you get the idea.

God wants us, and our relationship with him, repaired, back to the way he originally meant things. He doesn’t want to knock us down and start again from scratch.

Plucking Jesus’s beard. Or not.

Isaiah 50.6.

Because Jesus was foretold in the Old Testament, a lot of Christians throughout history have dug around the OT looking for as many scriptures as possible which might be foretellings of Jesus. They claim to have found hundreds.

And okay, fair, there are hundreds. But there are also a whole lot of passages which actually aren’t about Jesus. They’re about other stuff. Other people, other events, other teachings. Even other messiahs. (“Messiah” is a title of the king of Israel, and Jesus is the current king of Israel, but of course he had predecessors.)

These passages resemble Jesus-stuff, so Christians claim ’em for Jesus. But in fact we’re taking those Old Testament passages out of context. It’s so important to Christians that we amass as big a number of OT “Messianic prophecies” as possible, that often we don’t care we’re misinterpreting and misquoting bible.

Today’s Isaiah passage is one of them. I originally wrote about it for advent, but it has to do with Jesus’s suffering and death, so it’s important to talk about it during the Lenten season too. It’s about how it was foretold that Jesus would get his beard plucked. Supposedly that happened after he was arrested; while he was tortured before he was crucified. Some Jesus movies throw in a scene where inbetween smacking him around and spitting on him, someone grabs a big tuft of Jesus’s beard and rips it out. Yee-ouch!

Years ago I tried to find that beard-ripping moment in the gospels, and found it’s not there at all. Doesn’t come from the gospels. It’s supposedly from Isaiah 50.6.

Isaiah 50.6 KJV

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Some Christian musta read Isaiah, found this verse about someone getting their face spat upon, thought, “Well Jesus had his face spat upon,” and concluded this was a prophecy about Jesus. And Isaiah apparently also foretold Jesus had his cheeks plucked. So there we are! They pulled out his beard.

Is this passage a foretelling of Jesus? Nah; it’s about Isaiah himself. But tradition says it’s about Jesus… and as we all know, traditions aren’t infallible. This one sure ain’t.

“Fasting” from one thing at a time.

Custom during the Lenten season, because it’s a time to reflect on Jesus’s death and self-sacrifice, is the Lenten fast, between Ash Wednesday and Easter. (And take Sundays off. Not everybody remembers Sundays are feast days, and we’re not meant to fast on feast days.) But it’s not a total 40-day fast; many who practice Lent simply go without meat and alcohol… plus one other thing.

And for many, if not most, they only go without the one other thing. Hence all the discussions before Ash Wednesday of “What’re you giving up for Lent?” Then, during the Lenten season, “How’re you doing?”—a question which typically dies off after the people who usually ask this question, fail in their own fasts.

Lent isn’t the only time Christians “fast” from only one thing. I’ve done it. My church would call for a weeklong fast, or a 14-day fast, or a 21-day fast, and I really didn’t feel like starving myself just because Pastor had a spiritual bug up his heiney. (And as you can tell, my own attitude at the time sucked.) So like many a Christian, I did the laziest bare minimum: I gave up only one thing. Something inconvenient, yet kinda easy. Like coffee. Now, if you know how much coffee I consume, you might think this was an act of heroic self-control on my part… but nah, it’s really not. I’m not addicted to caffeine. (I drink it for the flavor, and switch to decaf after lunch.) Giving up caffeine was just as easy.

As was sugar—which was something I actually stuck with after the fast was over. But giving up bagels was unexpectedly hard; guess I’m more addicted to them than I realized. Meh; enough about me.

I’ve been asked whether giving up only one thing as a “fast” actually counts as a fast. It can. Two thoughts though.

First of all I gotta ask them whether they’re honestly fasting for the right reasons. You do realize God never obligates us to fast. Yes, there are those numbnuts who insist he absolutely did call for a fast in Isaiah 58.6, but obviously they never read the context: The LORD’s using fasting as a metaphor for justice and freedom. Has nothing to do with going hungry for God, nor giving up a particular item.

So we’re not disobeying God when we skip a fast, break a fast, “cheat” on a fast, or diet instead of fasting. True, our churches might want us to fast, and legalistic churches will certainly require it. But unless you swore to God you’d fast along with ’em, you’re not sinning if you don’t fast. (And of course lying about it, or pretending you’re fasting when you’re not, is always wrong.)

Likewise I don’t want people to think the purpose of fasting is to earn karmic points with God. God never “owes us one” for fasting, nor anything we do. Worship and obedience is our duty, Lk 17.10 not a favor we do for him that’s gonna earn us jewels in our heavenly crowns. What, did you not get enough participation trophies in youth soccer?

Fasting is simply a practice which Christians have found helps us focus better on God in prayer, and helps us develop self-control. That’s the only reason we do it. If anyone tells you there are other spiritual abilities, benefits, or rewards for fasting, I advise you to be wary. Too many of ’em are trying to get you to follow them more so than God.

Second I don’t assume Christians are lazy when they want a bare-minimum “fast.” Yeah, sometimes it’s totally that; been there done that myself. But more often it’s because fasting is hardcore. And admittedly, we’re weak. Going without food for a whole day? We’ll crack by 10AM! We’ll walk into the break room, someone will have brought doughnuts, and we’ll hold out maybe an hour. But knowing ourselves, less. A warm Krispy Kreme doughnut is a powerful thing.

I don’t say this to condemn weak Christians. Every last one of us was a weak Christian at one point. (Me, many points.) So if you’re still weak, I’m here to help, not judge or mock. You gotta build self-control. Fasting is the fastest way to do it, but it’s wise to start small and work your way up. Y’don’t just tackle the very hardest practices, and presume you’ll be a natural ’cause now you have Holy Spirit power. Fast small before you fast big.

So, the very least we can fast… is that one single thing.

And this is a very common Christian practice. Some Christians do it every Lent. I’m not saying you need to observe Lent. Start even smaller. Abstain for a week. See how you do. If you fail—and you may—try again.

Pontius Pilate’s attitude towards Jesus.

Matthew 27.19, 24-26, John 19.7-12.

Whenever preachers talk about Pontius Pilate, I find way too many of them describe him as an uncaring government functionary or bureaucrat, who clearly didn’t care enough about Jesus to stop him from dying.

I’m not entirely sure where they got this idea. I suspect it comes from bad Jesus movies. Most of them, trying to foreshadow Jesus’s death or create dramatic tension, try to depict the people who killed Jesus as way more organized than they actually were. It works for today’s audiences, who are mainly thinking of the way their culture works, not Jesus’s. In a democracy, if rulers want to murder someone, government answers to the people, and people have rights; so it takes a lot of conspiring between corrupt officials to try to make it look like a reasonable action. But the Roman Empire was no democracy. It was a fascist dictatorship, which answered to no one. Roman citizens’ rights were recognized, but no one else’s was, and you could kill ’em simply because they were inconvenient. Jesus easily fell into that category.

The bad Jesus movies also typically depict Pilate as an unbelieving skeptic, if not nontheist. The writers must figure if Pilate were religious in any form, he’d’ve fought harder for Jesus. The most they show, is Pilate is curious about Jesus; his accusers claim he’s a revolutionary, but Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” Jn 18.36 —it’s not a political kingdom; it’s not a political threat to the Roman Empire at all. So Pilate deduces Jesus isn’t a problem, and wants to let him go because he’s not, but the Judean rulers are so insistent, and Pilate doesn’t wanna rile them up, so he throws up his hands and crucifies Jesus as the path of least resistance.

All this junk worms its way into Christian sermons, because people remember movies way better than the text of the scriptures. But I’m going with the gospels, and they depict Pilate as really hesitant to have anything to do with Jesus. He’s particularly wary in John’s gospel. Here’s part of the reason why:

John 19.7-12 KWL

7The Judean leaders replied to Pilate,

“We have a Law, and according to Law,

Jesus is obligated to die,

for he makes himself out to be the son of God.”

8So when Pilate hears this word, he’s even more afraid.

9Pilate again enters the prætorium

and tells Jesus, “Where did you come from?”

Jesus gives him no answer.

10So Pilate tells Jesus, “You don’t speak to me?

Didn’t you know I have power to release you

and power to crucify you?”

11Jesus answers Pilate, “You don’t have power over me.

You have nothing—

unless it was given you from above.

This is why the one who betrayed me to you

has a greater sin.”

12ABecause of this, Pilate is seeking to release Jesus.

And in Matthew we see another part.

Matthew 27.19 KWL

As Pilate was sitting in the rostrum,

his woman sends him a message,

saying, “Have nothing between you and that righteous man.

For I am suffering greatly because of a dream about him.”

The serenity prayer.

One of the more popular rote prayers is “the serenity prayer.” It’s prayed by Christians and pagans alike, ’cause it’s the official prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous. Other 12-step programs use it as well.

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time,

enjoying one moment at a time,

accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it,

trusting that you will make all things right

if I surrender to your will,

so that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

and supremely happy with you forever in the next.

Amen.

Credit for the prayer is usually given to American theologian and philosopher Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), although the original version looks a bit different. Its first publication was in the March 1933 edition of The Woman’s Press, in Winnifred Crane Wygal’s article “On the Edge of Tomorrow.”

Oh, God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.

Wygal was a grad student at Union Theological Seminary, Neibuhr’s school. In her 1940 book We Plan Our Own Worship Services, she indicated she got the prayer from him. Neibuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton claimed her father wrote it for a Sunday service in 1943. As you notice, she was a bit off on the date—which caused some confusion, and controversy, when Yale Law School librarian Fred R. Shapiro stated in a 2008 New York Times article he’d found the prayer published eight times before 1943. At the time, he questioned whether Niebuhr even authored it. He doesn’t now.

Alcoholics Anonymous founder William Griffith Wilson (a.k.a. “Bill W.”) came across the prayer in early 1942. A member of his New York group found it in a New York Herald Tribune obituary and shared it. The group immediately adopted it, and included a copy of it in every outgoing letter.

Niebuhr admitted the idea behind the prayer had been “spooking around” for centuries. You can even find it expressed in Cicero’s Six Mistakes of Man: “The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.”

We gotta be better than “the righteous.”

Matthew 5.17-20, Luke 16.16-17.

Right after Jesus speaks on salt and light in his Sermon on the Mount, and tells his followers we need to be the world’s light, he says this about how we’re to live in order to be that salt and light: We gotta be righteous.

And by “righteous” Jesus does not mean we have to conform to popular Christian culture. We don’t have to be “righteous” the way conservative church people define righteousness. He doesn’t demand we act like they do, think like they do, dress like they do, vote like they do, or otherwise try to fit their standards. Jesus has a standard. What’s his standard? Well, the thinking and behavior he spells out in his Sermon on the Mount. He expects that of us. If the people of our churches are doing that—well they should, and good for them! But if the people of our churches are doing no such thing, and think they’ve found some other path to righteousness, like cheap grace or dispensationalism, I gotta warn you: Jesus doesn’t know them. And really it’s not safe to be among them. Leave, and join a better church.

If we wanna be righteous, we gotta trust Jesus. And Jesus says we gotta follow him. And—and here’s the part where you’re gonna see a lot of Evangelicals balk—we gotta also observe the Law of Moses. Certain commands still apply! Some don’t, because they only ever applied to ancient Hebrews. Some have clearly been superseded by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; the ritual cleanliness rules are an obvious example. But loving our neighbors or the Ten Commandments never stopped being valid; never stopped defining whether we’re right and wrong in God’s sight.

So if we wanna follow Jesus, we can’t be one of those Christians who think we’ve found a loophole which gets us out of obeying his commands and teachings in the scriptures. Israel’s scribes and Pharisees were notorious for their loopholes, and applied ’em so liberally Jesus couldn’t help but call them hypocrites, who pretended to be devout but were as pagan and evil as any Greek or Roman. Jesus expects way, way better of his students and followers.

His words, not mine!—

Matthew 5.17-20 KWL

17“None of you² should think

that I come to tear down the Law or the Prophets.

I don’t come to tear down,

but build up.

18For amen!—I promise you:²

Heaven and earth might pass away,

but neither one yodh nor one dot

ought ever pass away from the Law;

not until everything’s done.

19So whoever might annul the smallest of these commands,

and might teach this to people:

They¹ will be called least in heaven’s kingdom.

And whoever might do and teach them,

this one will be called great in heaven’s kingdom.

20For I tell you² this:

Unless your² rightness superabounds—

more than scribes and Pharisees—

you² might not enter heaven’s kingdom.”

“Suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

In both the Nicene and Apostles Creed, a certain Roman official gets mentioned by name—specifically so the creeds can cement Christ Jesus’s death at a specific point in history. Σταυρωθέντα τε ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου/stavrothénta te ypér epí Pontíu Pilátu, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.”

In order to keep their neighbors from conquering them, the Hasmonean priest-kings of Judea made a protection treaty with the Romans, and Herod Antipater 1 had taken advantage of his friendship with Roman senators to get the Romans on his side when he overthrew the Hasmoneans and made himself king. But when Herod died, Caesar Augustus overturned his will, overthrew Herod’s chosen successor Herod Archelaus, split Israel into quarters, gave a quarter to the squabbling Herod brothers Philip and Antipas, and made himself king of the two most important quarters. Now Ceasar was king of Judea—and since he was busy running Rome, he sent others to govern Judea for him. Pontíus Pilátus poʊn'ti.us pi'læt.us was the sixth of these governors, in office from 26 to 36CE.

The KJV renders his name as Pontius Pilate, which Americans usually pronounce 'pɑn.tʃəs 'paɪ.lət, and since the bible tends to call him Pilate, we presume that’s his family name. Other way round: Romans did their names the same way eastern Asians do. Pontius is his nomen, the family name. Pilatus is his personal name—and y’notice the bible’s authors tended to go with personal names.

The Pilate stone, on display in Jerusalem. Wikimedia

The reason we know so much more about Pontius than his predecessors or successors, is obviously ’cause Jesus was executed under his rule, so he has our attention. We know of him from the gospels, from historians Flavius Josephus and Publius Cornelius Tacitus, and from contemporary philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Plus in 1961 archaeologist Antonio Frova found the Pilate stone, a limestone block with “Pilatus” carved on it, dating from Pontius’s term, whch confirms he’s not fiction.

Unfortunately after Jesus’s death and resurrection, a lot of Christians made up a lot of fanfiction. It means Pontius’s history beyond these first-century sources isn’t reliable. But I’ll briefly go over what we have.

The world’s light.

Mark 4.21, Matthew 5.14-16, Luke 8.16, 11.33, John 8.12.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his students they’re the light of the world. And multiple times in John, Jesus himself is declared the light of the world. Here, I’ve got one of those passages lined up for you.

Matthew 5.14 KWL

“You’re² the world’s light.

A city can’t be hidden when it lies on a hill.”

John 8.12 KWL

So Jesus spoke again, saying, “I’m the world’s light.

My followers should never walk in the dark,

but will have light and life.”

So which is it? Both, obviously.

It’s not a contradiction. Jesus is the true light who entered the world; Jn 1.9 as long as he’s in the world he enlightens it; Jn 9.5 whoever believes in him needn’t live in the dark; Jn 12.46 he reflects the fact that God is light. 1Jn 1.5 And we’re the light of the world when we follow his example, and reveal to the world God’s kingdom is near, same as Jesus did. Once we were darkness, but now light, Ep 5.8 for since God’s now our Father, we are light’s children, 1Th 5.5 shining as lights in this dark world. Pp 2.15

Yep, this light metaphor is all over the bible. Wouldn’t hurt us to read up on it, and see all the different ways God wants us to carry his light. 2Co 4.6

Starting with the city-on-a-hill idea. Nowadays we don’t create cities on hills. When developers create a town, they place them somewhere convenient: Outside bigger cities, near main roads, a place easy to access. Hills aren’t so easy, plus there’s all the hassle of building on a hill. Put a city on a hill, and it’ll nearly always be an expensive city. But back in ancient times, rulers worried about invasion, and figured a hill was easier to defend than a plain. Plus they could see their enemies coming. The downside was their cities were very visible-especially at night, with all their torches burning.

That’s the trait Jesus wants his followers to have: We oughta be nice and obvious. (True, it makes us more visible to enemies, but let’s not hang up on the negative.) If Christianity is a city on a hill, we Christians need to be visible. No hiding our faith. No concealing who it is we follow.