Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

In this final episode in our Lenten series, we turn our attention to the resurrection. "The way Jesus announces [his resurrection] is pure Jesus. We discover that Jesus has been just standing there quietly with Mary, saying nothing. I love that. It's so like him to just be present with Mary. Generally speaking the more powerful our voice is, the more market share we have in a conversation, the more we use that. No one has more market share than Jesus. No one has more powerful voice, and yet he's the quietest person in the room." "Jesus's sign is his spent-ness." "Jesus's sign is his spent-ness. He loves to the very the end, the Telos. He's completely drained of everything at the end of his life. His scars, his wounds, reveal the completeness of his love. And for us, it's our scars that bind us to Christ and that reveal Christ in us to others. Christianity is not some sort of scar management or plastic surgery. That would be taking the American dream and draping it over true Christianity and missing the real thing."

Jesus doesn't say he's troubled in spirit. John, who is just to his right, picks it up. If you are aware of someone—you love them, or you are just an astute observer of people—you can tell when they are anxious. I think this is one of three references that John has to Jesus' anxiety. And they are all surrounding the passion. What I love about it is that it normalizes anxiety. So much of our modern world either tries to escape anxiety or feels guilty about it. But Jesus was anxious." "If you are a lover of people, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the biblical love, it's going to lead you into tension." "What I love about this whole scene [when Judas and the Jewish leaders arrive at Gethsemane], is that when you put it all together, Jesus is like Bruce Lee or Jason Bourne. Everything's a weapon. He's rebuking, loving, protecting, challenging, healing, commanding. He is the prince of peace. So this person that we saw all agitated is in complete command of himself. Even now he's probably feeling anxiety, but he's not trapped by his emotions. He is a vibrant lover of the people around him. And that's what makes the passion so beautiful. The camera has moved to slow motion on Jesus life we can see incident after incident where Jesus is loving, rebuking, caring, comforting, lamenting. He's showing us what it is to be a person."

"God in his wisdom is kind of bringing a poverty on the entire world. It's striking, especially in America. We have a Declaration of Independence so it's written in to our seminal documents that we should not be constricted by anybody. And yet God is constricting us." "I'm not saying the virus is a beautiful thing, but all suffering for those of us who are in Christ can be drawn up into the dying of Jesus." "The only way he can make us weak is to overload all our well-oiled systems. And that's what's happening in all of our lives to different extents. And we are surrounded by people who are also overloaded. People are losing their work, coming under financial stress. So it's not only something that teaches us to love, it opens up doors, opportunities to love."

In this episode, we look at how Jesus' sadness as he nears the cross is another window into his personhood. "It really is true that Jesus is present. He's present with not only their rejection of him but with himself. He's comfortable being sad. And I don't think as Christians we're that comfortable or we hear much teaching on the negative emotions." "It's just a remarkable window into Jesus heart that he's looking outside of himself at a time like this." "One of the neat things about Jesus' sadness is that he doesn't get self-entangled. That is, if there's a problem in Christianity with stoicism, in the broader culture there's increasingly this problem of getting self-entangled in your grief. If emotions can be a bit suppressed within Christianity, within the broader culture they have almost become sacred."

This episode begins a new series on Jesus' Passion by looking at how the disciples want to go higher, but Jesus is focused on going lower. "James and John get their mother to try to get them the number 1 and 2 places in the Kingdom. And the other disciples don't say 'You know I don't think that is Jesus way.' They are just mad that James and John beat them to it! They are all fighting for the top. But Jesus is remarkably gentle through the whole thing. The disciples are functionally Epicureans—hunting for the shortcut across the 'J' of the J-Curve. That's our natural desire." "The disciples want suffering-free glory and Jesus says it doesn't exist." "One of my favorite phrases from Jesus in Luke 15 is where Jesus says take the lower place. I just love that. There is an act of the will where you take the lower place. You are deciding that you are going to go lower. I just think the opportunities that we have to do that at the big and the small level are enormous. It's as simple as a moment in conversation at the family table, letting someone else interrupt me so my idea takes the lower place..."

This episode wraps up our series on J-Curve: Union with Christ by looking at how the J-Curve helps in a mini-crisis. "The Apostle Paul introduces the J-Curve as a kind of a master story 'let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 2:5). And then he describes the downward journey of Jesus all the way to death on a cross." "Every community has a narrative." "The J-Curve normalizes the bumps. There's a kind of perfectionism now in our culture that sort of demands that life should be bump free. Paul the Apostle is a perfectionist, but his perfectionism is in his ability to reenact the dying and rising of Christ. It's the perfection of love. It's the perfection of faith. And it's not in my situation. So it allows me to have this calm center in all kinds of circumstances."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "When we think of idolatry we think about how it affects our relationship vertically with God and that is obvious and good but we're not necessarily attentive to how it affects the horizontal relationship with those around us." "Ministry is particularly subtle idol because it's got Jesus written all over it." "Paul sits on the word 'know' in Philippians 3. Because in the J-Curve you get to know Jesus in ways you would never have known him through teaching or study. The good shepherd gets very close to you in the dying because it's his story. It's his spirit and his presence. So Jesus becomes your friend in the dying."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "You can see two different loves operating here. Field hockey is a lesser love, but it is still a valid love. It was taking more time and energy than my greater love for Emily to know Jesus. But nevertheless, that greater love was shaping how I responded to failures in the lesser love." "There's this whole world of lesser loves that are just delightful. Becoming like Jesus is not the dissolution of those lesser loves, but them rightly ordered." "My imagination was captured by the idea that I wanted Emily to be in Jesus. I knew that the way to become in Jesus was to travel his journey and out of that would come resurrection. And it worked! It's so powerful! It was an imaginative vision of the beauty of Jesus coming into my family that had been mastering me for some 20 years."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "My sister Rosanne got into Wellesley College and she came back on Thanksgiving vacation and said 'Paul, you could get into Harvard.' She didn't have to say that twice. I heard that once and I was planning my life..." "We are all 'in' something. 'In Christ' is mystical, but it's remarkably unmystical as well. "If you teach justification by faith and the atonement separate from this really rich idea that that I am in Koinonia with Jesus then you answer the question at the beginning of Romans 6 badly. The answer in Romans 6 to the problem of selfishness and the Christian life is that our union with Christ is an embodiment in which we continually reenact His life of love, and that leads to suffering and a life of repentance."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking closer at what we tend to do instead of the J-Curve: marketing ourselves and trying to climb the failure-boasting chart. "The word "boast" the way Paul uses it in Philippians 3 is bigger than our English word. It also includes glory and rejoicing. So, when your favorite sports team wins, you glory in that sports team. The concept gets right at the heart of how our flesh operates." "When I was silent in that meeting, it put to death something evil in me – my boasting self. I felt the pain of that." "A lot of people are quiet – they don't boast – but Paul is not so much talking about what you say, but about the boasting self. If you are critical, that's a form of boasting. You're bringing someone down. Gossip is the boasting self. You're sharing information about someone else that quietly lifts you up. So many of our sins rotate around this desire to move up the failure-boasting chart!"