Entries Tagged 'Christ' ↓

The posts below are too pessimistic and nostalgic to leave by themselves for Holy Week, so I will give you something better to contemplate from a great Christian writer who is strangely not known as well as he should be by Christians today:

“Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.” Blaise Pascal

Something our pastor said in church yesterday threw into high relief what we mean by “Passion Week.” It isn’t about our passion. It’s about Christ’s passion. That is to say, His feeling and His suffering, His zeal to accomplish our salvation, His passion for us!

Pop-spirituality guru Deeprak Chopra writes an essay entitled Why We Need a New Jesus.  

He says there have been two Jesuses. One the rabbi of history, and the other the divine savior created by organized religion. He says we need a new one, a Jesus of “higher consciousness.”

A prophet of higher consciousness sounds pretty much like Deeprak Chopra. The way I read this essay is that he is volunteering for the job.

But you can bet that the new Jesus he wants or wants to be will not have a Cross.

A letter-writer to the “Washington Post” fulminates at the way NASCAR allowed the Daytona 500 to begin with a prayer.  Not only a prayer, but one that “invoked Jesus Christ by name.”  This, says the letter-writer, is another step in the effort to make Christianity into our nation’s official state religion.  Read  the letter.  Notice what is happening.  Yes, the government is not allowed to favor Christianity in schools, the military, and public events.  But now that same standard is being applied to a private event that receives no federal money (why should NASCAR need to?).   On a much larger scale, we have been seeing the God-free rules of the government applied in private companies, as in stores not allowing their employees to mention “Christmas” even in Christmas sales.   This is phenomenon has not just religious implications but also political implications.   People evidently see the government as so all-encompassing that government standards should be applied to EVERYTHING.

The Anchoress gives us a remarkable Lenten meditation that explains the significance of circumcision in the Old Testament, relates it to virginity, and brings it all together with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That huge statue of Christ overlooking Rio De Janeiro (where our fellow Cranacher Frank Sonnek lives) was struck by lightning, the moment captured in a remarkable photograph.   Getting struck by a bolt of lightning is the primeval conception of  God’s judgment. In this image, Christ takes that judgment into Himself.   This, my friends, is a photograph of the Gospel.