Category: Gospel of Matthew
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Recalibrating Our Religion: Jesus on Divorce
“It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31-32) Divorce is a huge and painful issue; I’m…
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Talking Slant: Jesus on Lust, Love, and Fidelity
Note from Rachel: This week’s post is a roundabout examination of some of Jesus’s most challenging teachings. It’s a long one but I felt it needed to stay in one piece. Here we go … Jesus can be slippery, so that when his words seem most stark, most black-and-white, perhaps they are not stark but…
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Still Praying in the Wilderness
It was the hardest season of my life, and I had not yet figured out the reason for it. One thing I was absolutely sure of: it was not—it could not be—God’s will. My spiritual life had followed a powerful trajectory. My faith was born in a Christian home, and though I was very young,…
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Fire Words
Fire Words The 19th-century poet Thomas Gray defined literature as “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” A more prosaic definition might say that literature is a work of letters that explores the human condition, that endures because it puts form to something we all feel. Thomas Gray’s definition made me think of a poem…
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Our Father
Once, a very long time ago, there was a garden. Six days of uproarious joy created it. Out of darkness came a Voice, and then light, galaxies spinning, earth and water, wings and running feet—life. There was nothing, and then there was colour: green trees, blue seas, shimmering grey mists. And a garden. Then the…
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A Brief Hiatus
Those of you who check will have noticed there was no new Matthew blog today … or last week … sorry about that. Both weeks, a heavy schedule beat out my best intentions to get posts written. This is likely to happen for several more weeks as well. So I’ve decided to declare a brief…
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The Way of Reconciliation: How Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment
Jesus is relentless in his examination of anger: its roots, its ugliness, the damage it does, and the guilt we incur because of it. Along the way he continually underlines the fact of judgment. We might be tempted to see “the judgment of God” as something arbitrary or cruel, but the truth is that because…
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God, Part 3
Jesus says those who treat others with contempt are subject to hellfire. It’s easy to think we know exactly what that means, but we may miss a lot if we just skim over this. Let’s take a closer look. When Jesus talks about anger, he takes it in levels, and he gives levels of judgment…
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 2
This should not be shocking to any Christian, but to me it was when I discovered it: God respects, values, and esteems people. All people, simply because they are human beings, created in his image and created with worth. For the last several weeks we’ve been exploring Jesus’s moral teaching on anger, which he equates…
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 1
Anger is not a victimless crime. Anger is aggressive. To have someone’s anger turned on you—especially when it’s “without cause,” not your fault or out of proportion to your fault—is emotionally and physically traumatizing. At first glance, Jesus’s moral teachings in Matthew 5 can look almost trite or arbitrary. Given a chance to address…