The calendars we give and receive as Christmas gifts – Sudoku-a-Day desk tear-offs, or expensive, hang-on-the-wall art photography – don’t pay much heed to the Christian calendar aside from noting its two largest festivals – Christmas and Easter – and helping retailers take advantage of a few minor ones – Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s, and Hallowe’en. Denominational church calendars fill in more of the blanks, but we all know that the year we follow starts on the first of January, a bleak and dreary date in the northern hemisphere and a riot of colour and beauty in the southern. I don’t know anyone who hangs up a calendar that starts the first day of Advent and marks their year in the way Christians once did long ago. Of course, I don’t know any monks. Perhaps they do.
There are at least three traitor stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. They were all well known to Jewish readers of those scriptures. They would not, however, have been familiar …
I want to interrupt our study of Matthew for a few weeks in order to turn our attention to the great …
Holy Week, including Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were especially meaningful to me this year. So was the celebration of Easter. In this column today I would …
Reclaiming Good Friday as a major focus of both Lent and the Christian story will be at the center of my life this year, when I spend that day …
Behind the narratives of Easter contained in the gospel tradition was an experience that was undeniable, powerful and true to the followers of Jesus. That experience exploded upon them …
It is certainly a fact of history that a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans somewhere around the year 30 CE. This crucifixion came during the …
We come now to our fourth and final question in search of the meaning of Easter. Then with clues, hopefully well established, I will seek to draw some conclusions …
First, we asked who stood at the center of the Easter experience and Peter emerged from our study as the one in whom the meaning of resurrection …
Through this column during the weeks before Good Friday, I did a series on the story of the cross and its meaning, seeking to call you, my readers, into …