Jesus Christ

Michelangelo’s last sculpture is puzzling – two imprecise figures of Jesus and Mary melting into one, with a fragment of Jesus’s right arm detached from his body. It’s the Pietà Rondanini, the third and last pietà sculpted by the artist, very far from his first and meticulously detailed Vatican...

The grand storyline of the Bible can at times make depressing reading if we do not pay close attention to the gospel threads that hold it together. After its glorious beginning in the accounts of creation in Genesis, our high hopes for God’s wonderful world are dashed by the third chapter and its...

The Jesuit Jean Pelletier, called by Duke Ercole II of Este to put a stop to the dangerous “Lutheran” practices of his wife Renée, was not impressed by his conversation with the duchess. “The poor woman has no education,” he wrote to his Father Superior, Ignatius of Loyola. “She only knows a few...

T hink about the last time you issued a challenge. It took a lot of confidence, didn’t it? Not only did you challenge someone else to do something, you challenged yourself to do the same. How much confidence would you need to be able to stand up in the midst of the world with the devil and his...

The Lord through the prophet Jeremiah prophesied of a day when He would establish a new covenant for His people, a covenant unlike the old one enacted under Moses. It was under the Old Covenant where Israel was called to be a nation of priests to a watching world, a mediatorial son who would make...

O ne of the best ways we help our children appreciate what they have is to take something away for a time only to restore it later. In a similar way, one of the best ways for us to appreciate what we have in Jesus Christ is to think about what Adam took away from us by his disobedience. He took...

I n the last article , I noted four points regarding a puritan doctrine of union and communion with Christ. Continuing that discussion, a fifth point is that communion is communion in what Christ himself possesses . The saving benefits that we receive in union with Christ are properly Christ’s own...

Articles 3-4 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion continue to build on the narrative of the passion and triumph of the Lord Jesus Christ, on which Article 2 concluded. T he eternal Son, who took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, " truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried" (...

It’s no secret that John’s Gospel often cloaks depth with simplicity. That is part of the beauty of his prose, which carries over from the Greek into many English translations. A prime example is the often-quoted John 14:6, an utterance of Christ comprised of a simple subject, a linking verb, and...

The gospel is, without question, the most wonderful message this world has ever heard or will ever hear. If we are Christians we love to hear it and [should] never tire of reflecting on it. But the big question we face is how to communicate or proclaim it. How do we get it across to those who need...