“In historical fact, we are the ones who have co-opted their Jesus. As I got to know Jesus, the realization sank in that he probably did not spend his life among Jews in the first century merely to save Americans in the twentieth. Alone of all people in history, he had the privilege of choosing where and when to be born, and he chose a pious Jewish family living in a backwater protectorate of a pagan empire. I can no more understand Jesus apart from his Jewishness than I can understand Gandhi apart from his Indianness.”
The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground:
murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
“Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal – it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being he played by the rules, harsh rules; small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.”
| The Jesus I Never Knew
“The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play.”
| The Jesus I Never Knew
Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.
| The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey
In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.
| The Jesus I Never Knew By Philip Yancey
Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.
| The Jesus I Never Knew By Philip Yancey