An ambitious apostle took matters into his own hands, and chief priests bought the Saviour’s silence.  Other apostles slept off the Passover wine, or fled at the prospect of guilt by association, or both.  The arrest was made on no charge whatever, and trials were conducted by a corrupted council and a foreign despot, followed by cheers of a riotous crowd at the capital sentence pronounced on the innocent.  There seems to have been no end to the wrongs done to the Lord. In the last hours of...

What’s missing from the complement of signs of Jesus?  Now that we’ve heard the last of them, the raising of Lazarus, what comes next? Jesus called his miracles “signs”, so that they point on to something ordinarily beyond our grasp.  All his signs overcame some natural impossibility: The lack of wine at Cana The mortal illness of the courtier’s son The disability of the man at Bethesda The hunger of the 5,000 in the wilderness The properties of the Lake's water The disability of the man born...

In the long aftermath of his healing, the man who’d been born blind testifies to Jesus before he sees him.  And that's how it is with every one of us: we witness to Jesus by what we say and do long before, it seems, we get to see him face-to-face. That witness precedes sight, that testimony comes before certainty, speaks to us about the minimums needed to become Christian.  It's not necessary that all questions are answered or that all doubts have been dispelled.  We certainly don't have to...