Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Paul, Robert and Liz look at how Jesus says no to the first of Satan's three temptations.  "Jesus is saying no to immediate gratification, and he's saying yes, in this case, to hard work. He's not escaping the incarnation that he's in. He's staying within the garden that his Father has given him; he's not trying to get out of that garden." "We are made for our Father's words." "If you have a hard relationship, you really should have one or two good friends that you could go to to ask their advice. My rule is if I've told two people, I’m right on the edge, and if I’ve told three people, I probably need to go talk to the person. It's good to have someone you can unload with, but it can be tempting to eat sympathy as a kind of bread. Our life comes from Christ."

Paul, Robert and Liz take one last look at how we see Jesus as he relates to his mother, Mary, at the end of his life and in the last glimpses we get of Mary in Scripture. "This scene here in John 19 is quite something. If you think of the last 3 vignettes where we’ve seen Mary at work, the biggest difference between this one and those other scenes is that here, Mary is doing nothing. Each one of those scenes was a situation out of control, and we saw Mary coming in and exerting some form of control." "Mary always initiated, and now, she’s silent and Jesus initiates towards her. Jesus, as the eldest son, cares for her retirement and physical well-being and asks John to take care of her." "In Acts 1, we see Mary mentioned with the other disciples praying in the Upper Room. So there’s this beautiful blending now of the family of Mary and the Jesus family. You see this all over the world: families become the most whole when Jesus enters in."

Paul, Robert and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’ dependence on the Father, as we see it at play in his relationship with his mother, Mary. “Jesus and the disciples have become so busy, and Mary thinks his life is out of balance… the whole family does. They’ve come to this conclusion that he’s out of his mind to put food as a secondary priority – to be too busy to eat! You do need nutrition… there’s wisdom in his family’s perspective, but it’s wisdom out of balance.” “At the heart of tribalism is that the family unit is sacred: you cannot buck your family.” “The gospel brings freedom. One of the things that makes Jesus so hard to pin down is his freedom with people.”

Paul, Robert and Liz continue their series on Jesus’ dependence on his heavenly Father, looking at how Jesus gets separated from his family and winds up in the Temple when he is 12 years old. "This is the last glimpse we get of Jesus in his childhood. He would have been considered a man at age 13. It’s a wonderful glimpse of their nuclear family. We see Mary come alive as a person." "A super-spiritual, icon-like Mary would probably just embrace Jesus quietly and sob, but here she is such a recognizably human mother!" "Jesus learned to read and write from a very early age. Jesus is at the temple – they had one room just for instruction -- he’s talking to the teachers of the law. There’s a pattern we see already. He’s listening to them and asking questions. And they’re amazed at his understanding, so they’re asking him questions, too. It’s a true dialogue! That pattern of asking questions and understanding will be his for his whole life."

Paul, Robert and Liz continue this series on learning dependence from Jesus, focusing specifically on the role that Scripture plays in helping us discern God’s will. “'You are my beloved son' – because you are in Christ, and that is the real you. You’ve been imprinted with the image of Jesus at the core of your being. That frees you to say, 'Oh honey, I’m sorry I really messed up.'" "What we see Jesus doing with the Old Testament, all of us do. It’s not like Jesus is being super spiritual – we just pick different sets of divine words that he does, and our choice of words, be it on social media, movies, or whatever, often messes us up instead of freeing us to be like Christ." "The one miracle I have puzzled over is Jesus stilling the storm. But I recently heard a podcast about it, and the speaker really nailed it: those molecules were created by words, so Jesus is speaking to matter and energy. He’s speaking to quarks, and they understood."

Robert Row joins Paul Miller and Liz Voboril in this new series looking at how, paradoxically, dependence on the Father frees Jesus to love. “Jesus’ brothers look a lot freer than Jesus. They don’t have this dependence on the Father the way he does. So they can go to the Feast. He says go, he’s not stopping them. He just says you guys have a freedom that I don’t have.” “His words could be a commercial nowadays: Your time is now. It’s always your time!” "Jesus sounds the opposite of free when he says, 'I don’t do anything but what I see my Father doing.' But what you actually see in his life is immense freedom. He has that that ninja capacity to pivot from compassion to honesty – the whole range of ways to love. I think that’s part of what is so attractive about his dependence. Our assumption is that dependence leads to a small, very limited life. When in fact, in Jesus, we see it play out in this amazing kaleidoscope of ways.”

Paul, Jon and Liz wrap up this series with an episode on prudence. “What’s fascinating is the difference between Jewish prudence and Greek prudence. The words have almost an entirely different sense. Both have this sense of standing down, but their motive is entirely different. For the Greek mind, particularly the stoic mind which dominated Greek thought, the danger was emotions…” “For the Greeks, prudence was how do you live wisely in a world of idiots…. one of the things that’s completely lacking in that is love.” “In contrast to that, you can see the Jewish idea of prudence flowing all through the book of Proverbs. My basic strategy is love. But how do I do it? I need to be careful, prayerful, thoughtful, asking questions. I need to be like a sheep among wolves, as shrewd as a snake and as innocent as a dove.”

Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty. “People cancel one another very easily and shut down with the other person. But Jesus says we can’t do that. We need to move towards our enemies, and you need to do it thoughtfully thinking, 'How can I care for them? What needs does this enemy have?'” “You cannot be passive with evil is another way of saying it. Evil is far too pervasive. It’s far too intrusive. It’s far too aggressive for you to have a neutral stance with it.” “‘Loving your enemy’ is almost like you’re in a fight, backed into an alley and you have one last big swing. You can either use that opportunity for a ‘Hail Mary’ of a swing against the enemy, or follow Jesus and get down on the floor and wash their feet.”

Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty. “Jesus is actually being a little on the funny side when he says, ‘First take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’ There’s this trace kind of light humor through the Sermon on the Mount. You know, ‘if your eye offends you pluck it out.’ But it’s striking that when someone frustrates you or there’s a broken relationship, Jesus begins with how do we see that person.” “There is a pain to meekness—you can feel like you’re disappearing, because you are—but then we’ve got this promise that the meek will inherit the earth!” "Judging tends to be quick. It’s this immediate analysis of someone else or a situation. Jesus isn’t saying it might not be accurate. But Jesus is just saying that you don’t have to have an opinion. And if you do have an opinion, you don’t have to share it, and if you are going to share it, then first stop and look at yourself for a little bit. It slows human relationships down."

“Peter is insisting that he's not going to betray Jesus. We know from the parallel passages that Peter keeps on insisting. The next thing Jesus says, after ‘Will you really lay down your life for me?’, is, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.’ We have a chapter break there, and we often assume that that chapter break is in the original, but it's not. It's seamless. Jesus is actually dealing with Peter trying to create an earthly home for himself. That’s where Peter is going with his insistence. It's a perfect example of Jesus not trying to win in his honesty.” “Jesus is so thoughtful in his love.” "A lifestyle of forgiveness functions like a check on the amount of honesty that comes out of us. Probably the biggest face of that is forbearance. Peter is almost certainly about to blast someone. He’s forgiven and forgiven and forgiven and he's reached his limit. Jesus is saying there is no limit. There's no point at which you ever stop forgiving and then he goes ahead and tells the parable of the man who owes 10,000 talents."