It's funny that Jesus was prophesied about by those who meant to oppose him. Anyone who thinks that God needs our assistance to accomplish his ultimate purposes can take a note from this. While we join God in that work, it is very much God bringing it about. We are included in that work which is ongoing.

(Also, if you wish to continue this reading plan, here's the rest of the year.)

Jesus enters a hostile territory to save a friend. This is a pretty good story in itself, but the saving is a resurrection, with a boost in the faith of his friends to boot. Since the Jewish leaders who questioned him were following, perhaps a few of them received a boost in their own faith as well.

To not recognize Jesus means you are not his follower. What he said to the contentious Jewish leaders remains true today. There are false versions of Jesus's message that lead to places that may seem good, but they certainly don't lead to Jesus.

The new way of approaching God is to approach Jesus. To walk in step with Jesus is to walk with God, and in God's direction. The illustration of the sheep pen with the robber and the workers illustrates this, and steps on a few toes along the way.

Hello, friends. :-)

All of the miracles Jesus performed on Sabbaths were healing miracles, making someone whole. And of course, doing so got him in trouble. If the Kingdom is subversive, then it is in this way: the thing which before could only point to our faults (the Law) has now been replaced with the way of Jesus, and that way does indeed bring wholness.

The language of family was familiar to the Jews, especially with the common bond of Abraham as their father. But Jesus was coming to establish a new Kingdom, a new kind of family. In this family, what came before Abraham was the common bond, and that was God.

To claim that God the Father speaks directly in your defense would have been pretty radical. It certainly would have stoked the ire of the religious leaders. Yet what Jesus spoke was confirmed by the church in the centuries that would follow: to see Jesus was to see God.

It seems that the familiarity that caused Jesus's family to doubt his divinity extended to his community. Everyone thought they knew who he was, because they had seen him grow up. But the eyewitnesses to his miracles had a different opinion, and that was the one that would grow the Kingdom of Jesus.

Sometimes those with whom we are most familiar have a hard time growing in our eyes. We know them so well, we can't easily see them as being different from the person we have always known. Such was the case with Jesus's family, who had a difficult time believing he was anything except their brother.