The Gospel reading for the Twenty Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Luke 14:25-37, is one of those passages that I just ache to cut down to size, to make certain that it says something more palatable, easier to handle, than what it seems to be saying.  Jesus speaks to a crowd: “now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (14:25-26 NRSV). Hate your family? Hate life itself?  In what way do these teachings agree with the command to honor y

In the Gospel reading for the Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, from Luke 14:1, 7-14, Jesus speaks two parables. The first deals with honor, embarrassment, humility and exaltation. In the NRSV, the first parable is as follows: “when he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.  "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take

When you write on the Bible, one of the things that you should avoid, if you can, is flippancy. People tend to get riled up when you are flippant about Scripture because flippancy, gone bad, comes off more as “disrespectful” than “light and airy.” As a result, the flippant writer, even if unintentionally so, comes off as arrogant and “puffed up” (to use a good Pauline phrase from the Corinthian correspondence: Greek, physio – see how biblical this post is already?).But I love lists and everyone on the Internet gets to make lists, so why shouldn’t a biblical blogger have lists? (I do not believe this is an argument from authority or