“It’s hard to find good help these days.” You have heard people say that, haven’t you? We heard this when we were young children, and we hear it now as adults, which might make us wonder in what “days” it would have been easy? At least from this parable, we can see that those “days” were not two millennia ago, as Jesus recognized that an employee would likely never care for a business the way an o...  Read More

Up to this point in the Gospel of John, we have been focused on the following questions: Is Jesus from God or not? Is he a prophet or not? Is he the Messiah or not? So chapter 10 might seem a bit strange to us as we shift into a parable about doors, shepherds, and sheep. We would be mistaken if we began to whistle the tune of Sesame Street’s One of These Things (Is Not Like the Other).For us, it s...  Read More

“I see what he means.” “She can’t see herself living there.” “It was good to see you.” In each of these sentences, the word see carries a different meaning: to understand, to imagine, and to perceive with your eyes (respectively).Being able to see is incredibly important, and when we look at this passage, we can be tempted to only see (understand) the ability to see or not as a physical disability...  Read More

Who do you think you are? It’s a question that often escapes our lips in moments of intense frustration and anger. When someone crosses a line or challenges our beliefs, this question becomes a battlefield where pride and identity collide.In John 8:48-59, we find the Pharisees asking this very question. Jesus has previously called them the devil’s children and said that they were disregarding the ...  Read More

This story records Jesus’ second “I Am” statement. The setting of the Feast of Tabernacles provides a rich cultural context for understanding the significance of Christ’s words. During this annual celebration, Jewish families would construct small tents to sleep in at night as a commemoration of their own wandering years in the desert after their miraculous escape from Egypt. The feast celebrated ...  Read More

Our passage begins with, “On the last day of the feast.” Early Hebrew readers of the New Testament would have seen the important contextual elements that were required to understand the phrase of Jesus regarding “rivers of living water.” The feast being celebrated during this section of John’s Gospel is the Feast of Tabernacles.The last day of that feast contained the most memorable portion of the...  Read More