The Gravity of Human Speech (Matthew 5:33-37)

“I once heard the worst thing
A man can do is draw a hungry crowd
To tell everyone his name, pride and confidence
But leaving out his doubt
I’m not sure I bought those words
When I was young, I knew most everything
These words have never meant as much to anyone
As they now mean to me
The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
‘Cause nothing happens here
That doesn’t happen there
So when you run, make sure you run
To something and not away from
‘Cause lies don’t need an aeroplane
To chase you down”

— The Avett Brothers “The Weight of Lies”

Behold Our King (John 19:1-16a)

“Lev.17:11: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I, I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your soul…’ In the [Biblical] case of sacrifice, the offerer tends to think, ‘I am putting this blood on the altar for the Lord.’ But here, the Lord turns that idea on its head. As scholar Baruch Schwartz explains in his essay “Prohibitions Concerning the ‘Eating’ of Blood”: What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you—for your benefit."‘ In his mercy and grace, the Lord has provided a way for guilty sinners to be forgiven.”

— Jay Sklar

Pilot's Three Questions (John 18:28-40)

“The scale of the reversal cannot be exaggerated:  when Jesus stands before Pilate… he must seem from the vantage of all the noble wisdom of the empire and the age... merely absurd…  But in the light of the resurrection… the mockery now redounds upon all kings and emperors, whose finery and symbols of status are revealed to be nothing more than rags and brambles beside the majesty of God’s Son, beside this servile shape in which God displays his infinite power to be where he will be; all the rulers of the earth cannot begin to surpass in grandeur this beauty of the God who ventures forth to make even the dust his glory.”

— David Bentley Hart