The Lord's feeling for the crowds and the action he takes speak to what health and holiness is. We believe health and holiness are when everything works as it is designed to do. Sickness and sin are inhibitors of the Creator’s design. We should just recognise that sickness and sin are used by God to make himself known to us: a sudden cure or a quick turn reveal the hand of God. But apart from that, there remain those times when we must contend with sickness and sin. Then, we put...

Doesn't eating his flesh mean he’ll die? How could we stomach eating it anyway? And in any case, what would eating it achieve? These are the doubts which are behind the Jews’ question: how can this man give us his flesh to eat? And until Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, they are fair questions. Normally, we would expect that no individual can bring the kind of benefits the Lord says comes from eating his flesh. But Jesus’ flesh is no ordinary flesh. We know this from his...

Believing in God is a risky affair. Pick the wrong God, and it's over. Israel alone enjoys the certainty of revelation: the true God made himself known to them. We know that many of our Old Testament heroes and heroines spoke with God. Moses, for example, saw the Burning Bush and was given the tablets of God’s perfect law. This revelation by God gives us far superior knowledge of him than we can arrive at by ourselves. When it comes to believing in God, we take up what Israel has long...