Quotes About Jesus

Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.

The gospel by which individuals come to personal faith, and so to that radical transformation of life spoken of so often in the new Testament, is the personalizing of the larger challenge just mentioned: the call to every child, woman, and man to submit in faith to the lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus and so to become, through baptism and membership in the body of Christ, a living, breathing anticipation of the final new creation itself

Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend "who is still liable to surprise us.

Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. And so this Temple, like the wilderness tabernacle, is a temple on the move, as Jesus's people go out, in the energy of the Spirit, to be the dwelling of God in each place, to anticipate that eventual promise by their common and cross-shaped life and work.

if it is true that Jesus ultimately fits no known pattern within the first century,51 it is more or less bound to be true that he fits none within the twentieth.

According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God's purposes for the world.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is simply learning to pray the Lord's Prayer.

This prayer doesn't pretend that pain and hunger aren't real. Some religions say that; Jesus didn't. This prayer doesn't use the greatness and majesty of God to belittle the human plight. Some religions do that; Jesus didn't. This prayer starts by addressing God intimately and lovingly, as `Father' - and by bowing before his greatness and majesty. If you can hold those two together, you're already on the way to understanding what Christianity is all about.

The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world's true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.

Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.

So what does Paul mean here? Doing it declares it: breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus's name declares his victory to the principalities and powers.

Being saved' doesn't just mean, as it does for many today, 'going to heaven when they die'. It means 'knowing God's rescuing power, the power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God's final great act of deliverance'.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus--in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest--though most scholars would put most of them earlier than that.

The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.

What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different…the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.

The story Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell is the story of how God became king—in and through Jesus both in his public career and in his death.

Israel isn't chosen in order to be God's special people while the rest of the world remains in outer darkness. Israel is chosen to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Israel is chosen so that, through Israel, God can bless all people. And now Jesus is calling Israel to be the light of the world at last. He is opening the way, carving a path through the jungle towards that vocation, urging his followers to come with him on the dangerous road.

Part of John's meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only what happens, purely pragmatically, when God's kingdom challenges Caesar's kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God's kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence rather than by violence, is to win the day.