Posts Tagged ‘the cross’

Great movies, like great books, are worth returning to time and again because they deal with transcendent themes.  Last night I watched the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke.  When I saw it as a teenager, I loved it.  I could quote my favorite lines.  My friends and I talked about our favorite scenes.  It was cool.  Yes, the ending was not happy (Do I need to warn about spoiler alerts for such an old movie?), but Paul Newman, who played Luke superbly, and the movie were cool.  Fifty years later, I’m not so sure. Read the rest of this entry »

The lion and the lamb are two of the most important biblical images of Christ.  Obviously, the lion depicts Christ’s power and the lamb his loving sacrifice for us sinners.  Nevertheless, we fail to do justice to these images, if we do not see how the Bible relates them to one another.   Two Christian novelists, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, can help us to grasp the profundity of the biblical portrayal of Christ as both lion and lamb or better be grasped by it.[1] Read the rest of this entry »

As far back as Irenaeus of Lyon (AD 120-202) and probably earlier, Christians have drawn parallels between the sin of man having come by means of eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and salvation being accomplished on the cross of Christ.[1]  Our two American Christmas poets tie in the tree of Genesis and the cross of Christ with the crib of the baby Jesus. Read the rest of this entry »

I actually have had some correspondence with our next Christmas poet, Luci Shaw (b. 1928).  Several years ago I hopefully sent her some doggerel that I hoped she would praise ecstatically.  In an act of kindness she wrote back to me that my poems neither sang nor danced and that I would benefit from a course on writing.  Thanks to her, except for intermittent delusional fits of grandeur, I have refrained from wasting my time and others with my poetry.  Besides exemplifying why all of us should read poetry and few write it, Luci Shaw’s beautiful poem, “Mary’s Song” expresses the magnificent paradoxes of Christmas and the Christian faith. Read the rest of this entry »

            Contrary to the novel and film of this name, both of which I only know by reading a written summary, the last temptation of Jesus was not to live a normal human life.  Even the devil knows that it went much deeper than that. As the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the crucifixion shows, Jesus was tempted with regard to his identity as the Son of God. Read the rest of this entry »