Blessed are the pure in heart; how will people believe that, unless we ourselves are worshipping the living God until our own hearts are set on fire and scorched through with his purity?

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Again and again the Sermon on the Mount calls and challenges us to a life of radical discipleship. Note: when Jesus says 'Blessed are the . . . . merciful, peacmakers', and so on, he doesn't just mean that they themselves are blessed. He means that the blessing of God's kingdom works precisely through those people into the wider world. That is how God's kingdom comes. That's one thing to hear afresh.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

Whatever life after death is, being with Christ which is far better, being in Paradise like the thief, etc, the many rooms where we go immediately... that is the temporary place. The ultimate life after life after death is the resurrection in God's new world.

God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.

The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.