Phillips: what Jesus actually said

Sunday, September 20, 2020
    Feast of John Coleridge Patteson, First Bishop of Melanesia, & his Companions, Martyrs, 1871
Meditation:
    [Jesus:] “I tell you that one greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”
    —Matthew 12:6-7 (NIV)
Quotation:
    So long as a man confines his ideas of Christ to a rather misty hero figure of long ago who died a tragic death, and so long as his ideas of Christianity are bounded by what he calls the Sermon on the Mount (which he has almost certainly not read in its entirety since he became grown-up), then the living truth never has a chance to touch him. This is plainly what has happened to many otherwise intelligent people. Over the years I have had hundreds of conversations with people, many of them of higher intellectual calibre than my own, who quite obviously had no idea of what Christianity is really about. I was in no case trying to catch them out: I was simply and gently trying to find out what they knew about the New Testament. My conclusion was that they knew virtually nothing. This I find pathetic and somewhat horrifying. It means that the most important Event in human history is politely and quietly bypassed. For it is not as though the evidence ha d been examined and found unconvincing: it had simply never been examined.
    ... J. B. Phillips (1906-1982), Ring of Truth, London: Hodder & Stoughton; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967, p. 16 (see the book)
    See also Matt. 12:6-7; Ps. 119:46; Hos. 6:6; Matt. 10:18-20; Luke 21:14-15; Acts 17:30; Col. 4:6; 2 Tim. 2:25-26; 1 Pet. 3:15-16;
Quiet time reflection:
    Am I too focused on trivial or superficial things, rather than the substance of Your Word? CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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