"Peter didn't know what the Hell he was talking about. He had no idea what the mountain-top experience really represented...Moses & Elijah represented encouragement and a reminder to be attentive to faithfulness, because dark days are coming..."
. . . one year we’ll defend our belief in an incarnation timed for Sukkoth as there is no way Jesus was born in December, and we’ll write the Card Talk about how the wise men did not show up until He was three years old. Eventually we’ll even address the fact that the little drummer boy was actually a drunk Roman solider looking for his estranged wife (okay, we just made that last one up) . . .
In discussing how fast "faith can move mountains," Matthew cuts Mark's three-day story in half. He speeds up the pace, chronologically and theologically.
Jesus stormed into the Temple, made a whip, threw tables, broke animal pens, and went house with a weapon. But some say He was never “violent.” How do we reconcile the two? How do we live with the tension?
All analogies break down eventually, but when dealing with the Bible the consequences can be pretty stark. There are dangers to meme-ing the Bible, even when the intentions and message are good.
On what it actually means to be “lukewarm,” and an admonishment to get up from the damn table, or to spit the bread and wine from out of your mouth and stop pretending you break bread with Jesus or His people.
Because sometimes those annoying, social justice warrior, millennial snowflakes are absolutely correct when they see the injustice of racism in a biblical narrative. Just like they see it in the world.
We love happy endings. So we sanitize the passage’s problems to fit the synoptic syllogism: "A is in pain / B loves A / B asks Jesus to help A / Jesus helps A." But that is not this story. This story reads very differently...