Identifying and Understanding Jesus as the Christ

“God's not in competition with us. He, he wants us now through our works of love to grow in salvation, in spiritual healing.”

“Faith indeed is the prerequisite, it's the, it's the opening of the door but love is what it means to live in the house”

“Like a man in a rowboat, faith and action must be pulled together if we are to follow Jesus. If they are not, we may well find ourselves going in circles.”

“Through Christ’s passion and death, we learn how God holds back nothing in bringing about our salvation”

“What Jesus says to Peter is not so much: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Christ” but rather “Don’t tell anyone that I am what you think the Christ should be. That’s not who I am.””

“So if anyone asks you who you are, you can reply, ‘I am a child of the most high God, the brother or sister of Jesus Christ, and I am heir to eternal life’”

“What distinguishes us from the brute beasts is that we humans can identify and espouse ideals and insist on living by them, in the full knowledge that this will involve much personal sacrifice”

“we do not gain the strength to carry our cross by turning inward, by feeding our anger and our discouragement. We gain strength by turning outward, by finding some way to give, some way of touching the life of another.”

“He's the true image of God, not the image we crafted to reflect ourselves or our society. And sometimes that can be uncomfortably challenging.”

“Not only does Jesus's identity include his eventual death and resurrection, it will finally be defined by those things”

“the way of God is always the path of suffering love”

“It matters profoundly that Jesus, who is God, had a body. The body is the place in which we do holy works of love or we sin and so God chooses to defeat sin by his love in this place.”

“Let us quieten our minds and hearts to perceive the figure of Jesus standing before us no longer in Caesarea Philippi but at our door post. Let us listen to him asking us; “who do you say I am for you?””

“Faith itself is a gift. Faith enables us to receive grace, which is the power of God enabling us to act. Salvation is all grace; it is all God’s power acting in us, that is, the Holy Spirit.”

“Evasion is not a way to salvation”

“It’s not that we can’t do good things without faith, but faith in Christ brings out so much more, so much more than what we are capable of on our own. These are works that can change the world, and those around us.”

“Is the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith a litany of verbal values that move us at the hearing? Or do they challenge us...so that we prefer to leave them for saints and prophets to fulfill while we make our daily accommodations to the messy reality around us?”

“It’s interesting, the more we focused on seeking and doing God’s will and less on our own problems and ourselves, the more Christ helped us carry our cross”

“our faith can end up being strengthened or weakened as a consequence of our choices, but it’s always a continuous process...after all, denying ourselves and ‘carrying our cross’ doesn’t exactly sound easy”

“It was precisely in his suffering that he accomplished this great act of justice”

“Does Jesus fight the definitive battle? Yes, he does...By absorbing their hatred in love, forgiveness, compassion and thereby transforming it.”