From time to time, particularly among
You’re gonna find
So… no bible is trustworthy but the
The main reason
Then their preachers gave ’em a big ol’ list of reasons why they should trust no other bible but the
But I digress. People don’t exalt the
And one of the reasons
I remind you of the definition of “elder” because you notice the word has three meanings: An adjective describing something old; an older person, and
Years ago, at a previous church I attended, we had an older person whom I’m gonna call Salwa. She wanted everybody in the church to call her “Grandma,” and think of her as the go-to person whenever we wanted prayer, or spiritual advice.
One evening one of our prayer meetings, she told us the story of how she came to Jesus. She grew up Christian, but never took it seriously; she spent many years living as a
How long ago had Salwa said the sinner’s prayer? Oh, three years ago!
That, I figured, explained everything. The serious lapses in Salwa’s bible knowledge meant she really needed to
She had
The problem—as you mighta deduced from how she wanted folks to call her “Grandma”—is Salwa was older than average. In her 70s, I think. And she’d been Christian for three whole years, and had a Christian childhood, and read lots of “spiritual” stuff; therefore she considered herself an elder. Really. One of our “church mothers”—or grandmas, to her way of thinking.
She was awfully fond of this passage:
Paul’s advice to Timothy is about treating fellow Christians as family, not underlings. But Salwa didn’t care about
Um… no. You don’t put newbies in charge of anything. Especially one who won’t listen to anybody. Our head pastor wisely never let Salwa take charge of anything… no matter how often she nominated herself. “No no; that’s okay; we got somebody for that.” Even when we didn’t, and he was gonna have to do it—but he knew Salwa wasn’t qualified to handle authority, so he never gave her any.
Eventually Salwa stopped attending. No doubt she went to another church, looking for the power she coveted, hoping that church would overlook her many red flags and consider her an elder simply because she was elder.
I have a lot of
So of course I have this verse in my brain in the
—but weirdly I also have it memorized in the
Y’might notice neither translation ends the verse with a period, because verse 23 is part of a much larger Greek sentence. I’ll quote it in the
It’s a paragraph-long run-on sentence—and breaking it down into smaller sentences does help make it more understandable. But the gist is that there’s no difference between Jewish and
But generally, Christians quote verse 23 as
Everybody has. No exceptions—but one; we totally make one for Jesus, ’cause duh, it’s Jesus.
And frequently, people make exceptions for fetuses and newborns, ’cause they never yet had the chance to sin. Seems only fair. But everyone else has sinned. You, me, everybody.
And because we’re justified by faith, gentiles can likewise be justified when they trust Jesus. God will graciously establish a relationship with them, and grant them
But those who proof-text this verse are seldom interested in the good news. Just the bad: All have sinned. Including you.
Though I’m going through John, and covering the Feeding Five Thousand Story from his
The other gospels approach it thisaway: It’s late, and the students think it’s high time Jesus’s audience went home.
This differing point of view presents a minor bible difficulty: Is it Jesus’s students who notice the people getting hungry, and figure it’s time for them to leave and get food, or is it Jesus who notices, and decides it’s time to feed them? I say minor bible difficulty because it’s not at all hard to recognize both Jesus and his kids would realize it was time for dinner; and it’s not at all hard to imagine Jesus might talk to Philip about feeding them before he spoke to the rest of the Twelve.
John didn’t write his gospel in chapters. Took a few centuries before some enterprising Christian divided the bible into chapters; took a bit longer before it was divided further into verses. But when John was divided into chapters, the editor largely did it right: In a lot of ’em, Jesus does a miracle, and there’s fallout as people argue over what this miracle means, and what it means about Jesus; and Jesus of course has to correct some of their wrong ideas. And today, popular Christian culture still pitches their theories about what these miracles and Jesus’s teachings mean, and the Holy Spirit of course has to correct some of our wrong ideas. Assuming we listen to him any.
So John 6 begins with the Feeding Five Thousand Story. All four gospels tell this story, ’cause it’s important: It reminds us
The 166km² freshwater lake in northern Israel—which we wouldn’t call a “sea,” but the ancient Galileans proudly did—was originally called
Anyway, by Jesus’s day, Herod Antipas had renamed it
We don’t know where the feeding took place. Some Christians have speculated it happened at Tiberias—that this is why the word
Anyway. Crowds heard about Jesus curing people, so they wanted to check him out for themselves. And he did cure some of them.
Some weeks ago I was speaking with someone about blogging on the gospel according to John. He expressed some excitement about it.
Doesn’t surprise me. He gets really, really angry at people whom he considers
And let’s be honest: Jesus does get angry sometimes! I’m not one of those interpreters who insist Jesus never did; that “God’s wrath” and “the day of wrath” are metaphors, or anthropomorphic euphemisms, for what’s really going on in God’s head, because God never really gets angry. Or insist, like the medieval scholastics used to argue, God can’t have legitimate human-type emotions, because that’d interfere with his immutable nature. (God does have an immutable, i.e. unchanging, nature. But the scholastics borrowed way too many ideas from Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, and went a bit wonky.)
Nope; sometimes God gets angry! We humans can legitimately piss him off. Whenever we openly defy him when we clearly know better; whenever we pretend to be righteous, but are hypocritically using our phony “righteousness” to stick it to others; whenever we take advantage of the weak and needy and marginalized, and assume we can easily get away with it because nobody’s watching. Human evil regularly enrages God.
It’s why the prophets and apostles kept pointing to a day when God would finally put things right—and called it “the day of the L
But back to Jesus. Did Jesus get angry? Duh:
But I should also point out two things: This is the only place in the gospels where Jesus is said to be angry; and Jesus doesn’t act on his anger. At all. He cures the guy—which is something he’d have done either way, happy or angry. He doesn’t yell at the hypocrites; he doesn’t stop teaching and storm out of synagogue; he doesn’t make a whip out of rope and start flogging them.
Oh yeah; the story
See, we’re
And some of us don’t really give a wet crap about injustice and hypocrisy:
People regularly misunderstand this next bit because they regularly misdefine the word
But dóxa doesn’t indicate a high opinion of someone; it just indicates one’s opinion. Good and respectable… or bad and infamous. It can go every which way. True, when Jesus is talking about the opinion people have of him, he rightly expects it should be a good one. He’s a good guy! He’s loving, kind, patient, generous, joyous; he exhibits all
Such a person should have the best reputation, whether it’s among devout religious people like himself, or among
And then there’s Jesus among the people of Jerusalem. And they’re giving him crap because
But lemme tell you: I run into plenty of people with the very same messed-up thinking. So have you. People who can’t fathom that a Christian minister is even Christian, simply because he’s a member of the wrong political party. Or because
What’s their problem? It’s exactly the same diagnosis Jesus gives to his critics in Jerusalem: They don’t have