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

"What is God up to?" (1 Samuel 1:1-20)

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship...is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things... you will never have enough. ... Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. ... Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”

— David Foster Wallace, This is Water