Mark

“Psalms as location; he clearly knows the scriptures very well. Psalm 110 was seen in the first century as Davidic; the Septuagint superscription notes this, so that conventional debates about whether this psalm is or is not by David seem moot. Jesus says so, and he was doubtless aware that it was regarded by everyone as a royal psalm, even a coronation anthem (Bock 1994–96: 2.1636–37).”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“When, in June 2015, relatives of the murder victims in Charleston, South Carolina, came face-to-face with the killer, several of them told him at once that they forgave him. Something similar happened after the Amish school shooting in October 2006. These incidents, widely reported, strike secular journalists and their readers as strange to the point of being almost incredible. Do these people really mean it? It is clear that they do. The forgiveness was unforced. It wasn’t said through clenched teeth, in outward conformity to a moral standard, while the heart remained bitter. Forgiveness was already a way of life in these communities. They were merely exemplifying and extending, in horrific circumstances, the character they had already learned and practiced.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“Imagination ignites the mundane. Think of the bush where Moses witnesses the holy presence of God. Imagination invites us into a world that transcends our world so we can return to our world transformed by the conversion of our thinking.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

“The church lives by and in its action of testimony. The confluence of the imagery of lamps and olive trees suggests, perhaps, that the oil of testimony will never be exhausted, that the church’s lamp will perpetually be replenished by the one who is himself God’s anointed.”
― Joseph L. Mangina, Revelation