Quotes from Scot McKnight

Jesus is teaching a kingdom perspective on how to deal with those who have sinned against us. Since the kingdom is a world of reconciliation, kingdom people are to forgive.

He's staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don't know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1–5; cf. Jas 4:11–12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don't are not kingdom people.

To those who pursue righteousness Jesus promises "they will be filled," and the word "filled" means "sated," "slaked," "bloated," or "filled to overflowing." The metaphor expresses absolute and utter satisfaction: they will find a kingdom society where love, peace, justice, and holiness shape the entirety of creation.

Gorski really helps us all when he zooms in on what these kinds of readings do to people. "First, it leads to hubris. It seduces its followers into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know." Such persons consider themselves elect and special and insiders, and such confidence tends toward condescension.

To keep its past as part of its present, God gives to Israel a series of rituals, routines, and rhythms.

But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can't find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.

We say we believe in God, trust in God, and are sustained by God; but in our actions we do everything for ourselves, trusting in ourselves and anxious about the providence of God, which unravels our theism.

those called will learn to trust God.

These changes reflect the Jesus Creed: Because Jesus loves others (us), he offers himself for us to replace the lamb. Thus, the Lord's Supper is Passover morphed by the Jesus Creed. The Passover lamb becomes the Lamb of God, and the Lamb of God leaves us a rhythm by which to remember what he has done for us.

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that I may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name by the practice of Christian-year spirituality; through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen. —ROBERT WEBBER

Martin Luther offers a powerful reminder in our temptation to go at life on our own: The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.

In Revelation we enter his incredible imagination and see what God wants his people to see.

Torah is not theoretical morality but lived theology, a life enflamed by knowing God.

Jesus sufferes to sympathize with our sufferings.

There is something about the Sermon on the Mount that makes Christians nervous, and in particular it makes Protestants nervous, especially those whose theology's first foot is a special understanding of grace.

The most significant passage in the Bible about the Bible is not, however, those two poignant New Testament passages that have given to us words such as inspiration (2 Tim 3:14-17; 2 Pet 1:20-21). Rather, it is Psalm 119, and it can be read as the Bible's view of the Bible.

our pain, we are invited to join Jesus so he can share our pain.

To say this once again, the focus of the Bible on fasting is not on what we get from fasting or on motivating people to fast in order to acquire something, but instead lands squarely on responding to sacred moments in life.

This both/and interpretation makes sense in the Jewish context. Jesus has in mind the Anawim, a group of economically disadvantaged Jews (Ps 149:4; Isa 49:13; 61:1–2; 66:2).27 Historians of Jewish history now mostly agree that the Anawim had three features: they were economically poor and yet trusted in God, they found their way to the temple as a meeting place, and they longed for the Messiah, who would finally bring justice.

In the potent words of Dorothy Sayers, our vocation is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

We need a generation of dissident disciples who confront and resist corruption and systemic abuses in whatever locations they are found: • corruption in the countries of the world, • our churches' complicities in these corruptions, • and the reading of Revelation as speculation, which blunts our prophetic voice.

He experiences for us what we do not want but deserve (slavery and death), and provides for us what we do want but don't deserve (a life of freedom).

Overall, then, fasting is how Israel responded when God's glory was dishonored, when God's will was thwarted, when God's people suffered defeat, or when one of God's people experienced sickness, tragedy, or death. God's people, in effect then, took up the posture of God toward grievous events when they fasted.

Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance)." And: "As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both 'I did it, my sins sent him there' and 'he did it, his love took him there.