Bible Study

LUKE 24:44-53 & ACTS 1:1-11 I have to start out tonight with a confession of sorts: I don’t really know what to make of the ascension of Jesus to heaven. Not from a preaching perspective anyway. There are a variety of issues in it that are worth exploring in this kind of context but from a preaching perspective this story tends to leave me a little bit … well … cold. What’s the point of it? How is it relevant today? Years ago I heard a friend of mine preach a sermon about the ascension and her take on it was that the ascension was like a coronation – that Jesus being taken up into heaven was essentially the equivalent of a king or queen being crowned. Queen Elizabeth had already been Queen for 16 months before being crowned in June of 1953. In the same way, my friend said, Jesus was already King of kings and Lord of lords; the ascension to heaven was just the last stamp of his authority in a sense. I suppose I can buy that. If one wants to understand the ascension even more basical...

MATTHEW 28:16-20 Last week our dive into 1 Corinthians was a kind of a turning point. I thought it was important to talk a little bit about the theology of resurrection, but I also wanted to make a clean break between two very different sets of resurrection appearances of Jesus. Up to last week the resurrection appearances that we looked at tended to focus on Jesus overcoming the doubts of his disciples; on Jesus essentially “proving” himself. They focused on what you might call Jesus’ substance – they were making the point that Jesus (even the resurrected Jesus) had a real body; that he was truly alive once again in some kind of physical, material sense. So there were all sorts of references to Jesus doing things that only someone with a body could do – inviting people to touch him, eating with people – things like that. And given that focus I thought the jump into 1 Corinthians was a good one, because it forces disciples of Jesus to confront that physical aspect of resurrection. But ...

1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-58 I want to start my discussion by saying that I have something of a special relationship with 1 Corinthians. A few years ago when I wrote my doctoral dissertation the topic I chose was preaching to congregations that were experiencing conflict, and a significant part of my work was using 1 Corinthians and its progression as a template for preaching in such circumstances. So I’ve spent a lot of time working with 1 Corinthians, researching 1 Corinthians, studying 1 Corinthians, writing about 1 Corinthians and preaching from 1 Corinthians. It’s a fascinating letter – written, of course, by Paul – and before we get into the topic for tonight we should perhaps just very briefly put the discussion about resurrection in Chapter 15 into the context of the letter. The church of Corinth was a church in conflict and Paul’s letters to them (there were at least 3 letters from Paul to Corinth, although we only have copies of the two that are in the New Testament) are trying to h...

Today we’re going to be discussing the mysterious 21 st Chapter of John’s Gospel. I had originally been thinking of referring to it as the “controversial” 21 st Chapter of John’s Gospel, but I decided that was too dramatic. There’s nothing controversial about it. Nobody questions that it’s a part of John’s Gospel; no one argues that it shouldn’t be a part of the canon. So it’s not “controversial” but it is “mysterious.” The mystery centres around its very existence. I alluded to this at the end of my comments last week. Why is there a Chapter 21? John’s Gospel ended very logically at the end of Chapter 20 when the author summed up the purpose of his Gospel and more or less left the story at “I can’t possibly tell you everything, so I might as well stop now.” And then we get the addendum – the 21 st Chapter.   The first thing I’d suggest is that it is very clearly a later addition. This wasn’t simply an afterthought on John’s part. Surely, if it had been that, then the extra ...