Sunday Reflection – August 24, 2025

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Healing on the Sabbath

Luke 13 10 One Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by an evil spirit for 18 years. She was completely bent over and could not straighten up. 12 When Jesus saw the woman, he called her over and said, “You are now well.” 13 He placed his hands on her, and at once she stood up straight and praised God.

14  The man in charge of the synagogue was angry because Jesus had healed someone on the Sabbath. So he said to the people, “Each week has six days when we can work. Come and be healed on one of those days, but not on the Sabbath.”

15 The Lord replied, “Are you trying to fool someone? Won’t any one of you untie your ox or donkey and lead it out to drink on a Sabbath? 16 This woman belongs to the family of Abraham, but Satan has kept her bound for 18 years. Isn’t it right to set her free on the Sabbath?” 17 Jesus’ words made his enemies ashamed. But everyone else in the crowd was happy about the wonderful things he was doing.

Kids Korner: Jesus heals on the Sabbath (August 24th)

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Read Luke 13:10-17 with your family.

Less than one hundred years ago, people were still treating Sunday as a day when nothing except attending church and reading the Bible was supposed to happen. Children were expected to be quiet and not play outside. There was no shopping of any kind. People did not run errands. This was how Christians followed the commandment “Honour the Sabbath and keep it Holy”.

We have changed a lot in the past one hundred years, and now people who go to church are also doing a lot of other things on a Sunday.

Jesus would have understood that. Jesus was a practical person.

In this story the leaders from the Synagogue were angry with Jesus because he worked on the Sabbath, he healed a woman who had a problem with her back. Those leaders were forgetting that the Sabbath was meant for the people to have one day of relaxation, it was not meant to be a punishment.

Jesus got angry at those leaders and reminded them of God’s teachings. He reminded them that kindness on the Sabbath for people, animals and nature was a good thing.

Leaving toxic people behind

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I was asked recently about toxic people and if we should keep forgiving them, the whole 70×7 and turn the other cheek stuff. To be honest, those two passages have been used to justify a lot of abuse and unacceptable behaviour, and we have to rewrite those scripts.

Toxic people are draining and inconsiderate, and if they are full blown narcissists, calculated destruction of your psyche is involved. There is a level of contempt there that should not be accepted today, and I do not believe was acceptable to Jesus at all.

Over the centuries the story of turn the other cheek has been used as a way to force mostly vulnerable people to accept poor treatment. Jesus asked us to, so therefore we cannot challenge it, is how that usually goes. But that is completely out of context. The real point of that story was to stand up to power. In the culture of Jesus’ day it was common for masters to slap slaves or servants, or even members of their own family, in public. There was a ritual about it. It had to be a backhand on one cheek, just once. The person receiving the slap was to be humiliated in public, and the power dynamic was maintained. By offer the other cheek, it was an act of rebellion. The shame shifted from the person receiving the blow to the person giving it.

This was never a story about accepting continued abuse.

When Jesus talked about love and forgiveness, he was not talking about forgetting. In fact that whole ‘forgive and forget’ was Shakespeare, not the Bible. The most common verb in the Hebrew Scriptures is “To Remember”. Forgetting was never part of the deal.

We can forgive, and we should for our own sake, but there is no call on us to forget. We can love, and we should, but the love is Agape – the love of our neighbours, community. There is no expectation in that word that we will allow mistreatment. We can love the world without being friends with people who hurt us. Like, love, tolerance and acceptance are all separate concepts and practices. They are choices, and we can choose to say no. That does not stop us from wanting good things for them, it just means we do not have to be part of that process or relationship.

So toxic people? Love them if that is what you feel, and then walk away. The Biblical expectation of that is far greater than any acceptance of continued mistreatment. We were never commissioned to be victims.

Sunday Reflection – August 17, 2025

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Trouble, not peace

Luke 12 49 I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire! 50  I am going to be put to a hard test. And I will have to suffer a lot of pain until it is over. 51 Do you think that I came to bring peace to earth? No indeed! I came to make people choose sides. 52 A family of five will be divided, with two of them against the other three. 53  Fathers and sons will turn against one another, and mothers and daughters will do the same. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law will also turn against each other.

54 Jesus said to all the people:

As soon as you see a cloud coming up in the west, you say, “It’s going to rain,” and it does. 55 When the south wind blows, you say, “It’s going to get hot,” and it does. 56 Are you trying to fool someone? You can predict the weather by looking at the earth and sky, but you don’t really know what’s going on right now.

Kids Korner: Following Jesus can be hard (August 17th)

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Read Luke 12:49-56 with your family.

One of the things we teach children is to be nice like Jesus was nice. But anyone who has been bullied or ignored can tell you sometimes being nice is not always the best answer.

The lesson today is very hard for adults to hear, so it can be even tougher for kids. God who is loving and kind is bringing fire? God is saying families will be seperated? Why is Jesus saying this will happen.

Well, Jesus did not say it WILL happen, Jesus said it WAS happening. As more and more people started to follow Jesus, their family did not always agree. The people who followed Jesus had a new vision of what the future could be like if we changed how we treated each other, and that scared a lot of their families and friends.

Jesus does bring division, but not because Jesus is mean. Jesus brings division because following God’s path turns us away from following the world’s path, and a lot of people really like the world’s path. After all, the world’s path is the one that tells them they can have all the money they want, they can live however they want, we don’t have to worry about strangers, and that people in trouble did that to themselves.

Following Jesus is going to be hard at times, but the end where everyone has enough to live and be happy, really is worth it.

Feed Your Faith

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In this episode, Debb and Deb discuss how to maintain and grow your faith when the life has other plans. It’s a tasty serving of practical tips for staying grounded in your faith in decidedly crazy times.

Who wrote the Gospels?

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After last week’s blog post I got to thinking about how much people know about the Gospels in general. Sunday School education really doesn’t get into it, and most Sunday School teachers have never been taught the differences and assumed histories of the four Gospels in the first place.

We have four Gospels in the New Testament, or Christian Scriptures canon. We can only assume why these four were chosen while so many others were not, because the criteria has been lost to time. This is a good place to look if you want to see many of the other writings in Early Church history, including what was known as Gnostic writings (not all books or letters excluded from the Christian canon are considered Gnostic).

The four Gospels were written anonymously. We can only guess at who the writer, or writers, based on how they wrote, the words and language they used, and any historic or geographical references we might be able to identify. That is not a lot to go on, so most Christian scholars today stick with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, names that were assigned by the early church.

Matthew was named after the disciple Matthew who was described as a wealthy Hebrew who was once a tax collector, Matthew 9:9, 10:3. This fits with the Gospel of Matthew having the most references to the Hebraic tradition and language. It is believed this scripture was written for the Hebraic-Christian community in Antioch, around 80 CE (Common Era). They would have been a small but wealthy group of early followers living in a large Hellenistic city. Matthew is the first Gospel we see because of its length, not because it was written first or is the most accurate or important.

Mark is named for a companion of Paul who also knew Peter, and travelled with Paul on his early missionary trips. His name pops up in several places in Paul’s letters, or the letters people assume Paul wrote. {Colossians (4:10), Philemon (1:24), and potentially 2 Timothy (4:11)} This makes Mark one of the first known people to share the word of Jesus outside of Peter and Paul, which would fit as the writer of the first Gospel. This Gospel was probably written in Rome, around 60-70 CE, just before or just after the Roman government destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and kicked all the Hebrews out of that territory. What makes Mark unique is that it is styled after a Greek play that assumed the audience would respond to the open-endedness of the play by deciding their own conclusions.

Luke was originally named after a reference in pseudo-Pauline letter Colossians (meaning people thought Paul wrote it, but scholars today do not agree). The reference was to a physician named Luke, Colossians 4:14. They thought it had to be Luke because of all the stories about healings, but today scholars are no longer convinced of that. They think it is more likely that Luke was just a very well educated Greek convert to Christianity, because the Gospel is written in very advance Greek, and he would be considered the first historian of the church. The writer of Luke also wrote the Book of Acts. Scholars can’t agree about where Luke was written, but they do agree it was in a very wealthy Hellenistic centre within easy travel to Jerusalem, around 90 CE.

John has a slightly different story. Throughout the Gospel of John, we read about the Beloved Disciple, but there is no name attached. Then at the crucifixion Jesus tells John to take care of his mother, Mary, when he sees her standing beside the “Beloved Disciple”, John 19:26-27. Modern feminist scholars think putting John in that story came afterwards and that the Beloved Disciple was in fact Mary Magdalene. There are a number of reasons to think this might be the case, given books outside the Christian canon that highlight Jesus and Mary of Magdalene’s close relationship (and no, I do not think they were married or in a romantic relationship, I think Mary of Magdalene was old enough to be his mother). Also, how full her story is at Resurrection, and that there was a final chapter added after the book was completed that highlighted Peter, a disciple who was known to have issues with Jesus’ close relationship with Mary Magdalene. This Gospel was believed to be written in Ephesus, around 100 CE.

None of this is absolute history, but rather conjecture based on how each book was written. Scholars hope that someday there will be more discoveries of ancient texts that will give us more information.

Sunday Reflection – August 10, 2025

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Possessions that possess us

Luke 12 32 My little group of disciples, don’t be afraid! Your Father wants to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell what you have and give the money to the poor. Make yourselves moneybags that never wear out. Make sure your treasure is safe in heaven, where thieves cannot steal it and moths cannot destroy it. 34 Your heart will always be where your treasure is.

35  Be ready and keep your lamps burning 36  just like those servants who wait up for their master to return from a wedding feast. As soon as he comes and knocks, they open the door for him. 37 Servants are fortunate if their master finds them awake and ready when he comes! I promise you he will get ready and let his servants sit down so he can serve them. 38 Those servants are really fortunate if their master finds them ready, even though he comes late at night or early in the morning. 39  You would surely not let a thief break into your home, if you knew when the thief was coming. 40 So always be ready! You don’t know when the Son of Man will come.

Kids Korner: Stop focusing on stuff (August 10th)

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Read Luke 12:32-40 with your family.

Sometimes when we read stories in the Bible, we can easily pictures ourselves being there. As fun as that is, it is easy to let our imagination build a whole picture and we miss what Jesus was trying to teach. It happens to adults all the time, too.

When Jesus talks about being ready and using the word picture of people waiting by the door, he is really talking about keeping our heart open to seeing God in people and places all around us. We can do that anywhere.

Jesus also talks about getting rid of everything we owned. That was hard to hear from Jesus, and it is hard to hear today. Some of the early followers of Jesus did give everything away, and then they needed to rely on others to buy them food and give them a place to live. So we have to use common sense when reading this passage.

Jesus was trying to make us realize that when we focus on stuff, we are not focusing on God or finding ways to help God’s people.

So when you find yourself more interested in what you own rather than other people, maybe it is time to think about what you really need, and get rid of some of the things that are just a distraction.

Are the Scriptures lying to us?

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In the first few centuries, those in educational leadership in the church tried to conflate or harmonize the Scriptures. In this past century Biblical scholars have been trying to untie those assumptions. So what does that really mean?

I was chatting with someone this week who asked why in the Gospel of John, John the Baptist pretended to not know Jesus, when we all know he was Jesus’ cousin. Interesting question, and takes a little bit to unpack. This blog post will only look at one of many characters than need attention, however, the first answer is no, the Scriptures are not lying to us.

The early church tried to line up all the Gospels, and where they did not line up well, they were forced to line up so the same story was assumed across all four Gospels. The problem is, all four Gospels were written by different people – unknown to us, and only given names because of this harmonizing process by the early church – and were written in different locations around Galilee and Israel in the first century of the Common Era (CE).

Mark was first, written around the time of the destruction of the second temple, so either just before or just after 70 CE (I am more convinced of the argument that it was just before). He was telling a narrative in the Greek tradition of playwriting that expected the audience to complete the final act either in their imagination or through action. If you look at the end of Mark you can see the story just stops, but at two different times others tried to add on endings, one to mirror Luke, and another that has confused scholars ever since.

Matthew came next, somewhere around 80 CE, and he was raised in the Hebrew tradition. No other Gospel has as many references to Hebrew Scriptures or practices as Matthew.

Luke followed around 90 CE. He was once considered to be a doctor because of all the healing stories included. Modern scholars have decided he was not a doctor, but was probably the earliest historian of Jesus, at a time when no one was really an historian like we understand them today, Luke just used better material to tell his story. Luke is written in the most elevated Greek, which suggests he might have been a convert to Christianity.

These three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are known as the Synoptic Gospels or storytelling Gospels. They have many stories in common, but each is told with differing details. Even the story of the nativity, which today is told as one story, is told differently in the Gospels. Mark doesn’t have it, Matthew had the wisemen and star, and Luke had the angels and shepherds.

The Gospel of John is completely different. While the Synoptic Gospels gradually reveal that Jesus was the Messiah, John comes out of the gate proclaiming this truth, and then spends the entirety of the Gospel proving it like Jesus was on trial. Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus is big and bold and never hides, unlike the Synoptics where Jesus is always trying to slip away or go unnoticed.

If we prioritize Luke, John the Baptist and Jesus were cousins. But that is the only Gospel that tells us they are related. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist had never met Jesus but he did have a conversion experience and then became a messenger of God. Mark and Matthew have John the Baptist as the wild man living in the desert, a reference to Isaiah’s prophecy.

Same person, three different backstories, all telling us about a person who told others to prepare, Jesus was coming.

So are the Scriptures lying? No. We have to look at each Gospel as a stand alone story.