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Matthew 15:29-39, the God of Israel, commentators have noted for centuries that this phrasing is strange if the crowd is Jewish, you do not praise the God of Israel as if it is a new discovery if that is already your God. That language is the language of people encountering something for the...

Matthew 15:21-28, was Jesus testing the woman? This is the question that has divided scholars and preachers and ordinary readers for 2,000 years and the reason it matters so much is that the answer changes the entire moral character of the story. If Jesus was testing her, then the silence and...

Matthew 15:26-27, it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs. 2,000 years of readers have stopped cold at those words and here is the first thing you need to understand, the thing that most English readers miss entirely, because it is buried in a translation decision...

Matthew 15:22, Mark writing for a different audience, calls her a Syrophoenician Greek, Mark 7:26, that label is more precise geographically, but does similar work. She is Gentile, she is Greek-speaking, she belongs to the dominant Hellenistic culture that had spread across the Mediterranean...

Matthew 15:21, for a Jewish rabbi in the first century, traveling there voluntarily was not just unusual, it was almost unthinkable, the history between Israel and the Phoenician coast went back centuries and almost none of it was good. The prophets Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, all of them had...

Matthew 15:21-28, to understand what happens in this story, you have to understand what happened the day before it, Matthew 15:1-2 opens not with a quiet teaching on a hillside, but with a confrontation. A delegation of Pharisees and scribes has traveled from Jerusalem specifically to challenge...

Luke 15:11-32, there is one more layer that ties this entire parable to the biggest story in the Bible, the parable has three characters, a father and two sons, one son who left and came back, one son who stayed, but was lost. The Bible has the same structure, humanity left the father, walked...

Luke 15:11-32, that is why Jesus said the tax collectors and prostitutes were entering the Kingdom ahead of the Pharisees, not because their sin was smaller, because their awareness of their sin was bigger and awareness is the door to repentance and repentance is the door to the feast. Be...

Luke 15:11-32, the father in the parable ran to the son, God in history ran to you through a manger, through a cross, through an empty tomb, running, always running toward the broken, toward the lost, toward the ones who smell like pigs and have rehearsed speeches about how they are not worthy...

Luke 15:11-32, you are always with me. The greatest gift was not the robe or the ring or the feast, the greatest gift was the father’s presence and both sons missed it. Consider this, right now, not theoretically, practically, if God took away the answer to your biggest prayer, the promotion...

Luke 15:11-32, there is something about this parable that almost nobody talks about and it changes everything, the story does not have an ending. The father pleads with the older son, he explains himself and then nothing, the parable just stops, you never find out if the older brother went in...

Luke 15:30, but when this son of yours, not my brother. Notice, but this son of yours, who has squandered your property with prostitutes, comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him, this son of yours, he will not even claim the relationship. The older brother distances himself from his own...

Luke 15:29, now listen to the older brother’s speech, because it is one of the most revealing monologues in the entire Bible. Look, all these years I have been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Count the poison in that sentence. Slaving, not serving, not living alongside slaving...

Luke 15:25-28, now, you come to the part of the story that most sermons rush through, the part that Jesus actually told the parable to get to, the part aimed directly at the Pharisees and at you. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field, he was working, notice that, while the younger son was...

Luke 15:20, taking the humiliation upon himself, does that sound familiar? A father who runs toward the broken, who absorbs the shame, who puts himself between the guilty and the judgment they deserve, who takes the humiliation upon himself, Jesus was not just telling a story, he was describing...

Luke 15:17-19, when he came to himself. When he came to himself, that means that during his entire time in the far country, the spending, the parties, the pigs, he was not himself. He was living in a kind of madness, a self-inflicted amnesia, he had forgotten who he was, he had forgotten whose...

Luke 15:13, this is how the far country works, it has stages, the first stage is exhilaration, you have money, you have freedom, you have no one telling you what to do, every night is a party, every desire is indulged and the voice of the father, that quiet voice that once guided your decisions...

Luke 15:12, I wish you were dead, that is not an exaggeration, the inheritance was distributed at death, to ask for it early was to say, your death is more valuable to me than your life, I want what you can give me, I do not want you, you are worth more to me as a dead man than a living father...

Luke 15:1-2, the sinners, the outcasts, the broken, the people everyone had given up on, they were pressing in close to Jesus, hungry for every word and the Pharisees, the religious elite, the rule keepers, the men who had dedicated their entire lives to obeying every letter of the law, they...

Matthew 25:1-12, because this parable is so rich and terrifying, Christians throughout history have debated the exact meaning of several specific symbols, while the core warning of readiness is absolutely clear, there are certain details that scholars and denominations still debate today. There...