Samara’s Reviews > Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions > Status Update

So it would actually be more honest to say, "I'm somehow the same as those who have done terrible things. I am made of the same human stuff. There must be something down deep in me that is capable of great ... And Jesus came to cleanse us of this, to purify us from what is spiritually wrong with us.

But these young people were facing certain public shame and guilt. Jesus Christ rescues them from all of that. And by employing the jars normally used for ceremonial washing, he is saying that he has come into the world to accomplish in reality what the ceremonial and sacrificial laws of the Old Testament pointed to [our spiritual need for cleansing to connect with God].

He is saying, as it were, I am the true master of the banquet. I am Lord of the Feast.
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"Yes," he is saying, "I'm going to suffer. Yes, there's going to be self-denial. Yes, there's going to be sacrifice-for me first and then for my followers as well. But it's all a means to an end, which is festival joy!

Consider that this is the very beginning of Jesus' career, of his public ministry. Imagine you are a candidate for office, an entrepreneur launching a brand, or a musician releasing your first major recording. In every case, you will choose your first public presentation with enormous care. …Why would Jesus decide that a quintessential signifier of all he is about would be to keep a party going?

Ch3’s Q: what— or who-can put the world right?
Answer (summarized): Someone fully divine and unhindered and perfect in His power and life. Also someone fully man, able to take on the full scope of the consequences of brokenness — mortal, vulnerable, killable.

“And so he wrote himself in. Behold who Jesus is, how he loves you and how he came to put the world right.”

Our relationship to God, then, is more like Shakespeare’s relationship to Hamlet. How much will Hamlet know about Shakespeare? Only what Shakespeare writes about himself into the play.

So after he raises Lazarus, the leaders have a meeting, and by verse 53, John says, "So from that day on they plotted to take his life." …He knew the only way to interrupt Lazarus's funeral was to summon his own…He knew what it would cost him to save us from death. Maybe he was able to feel the jaws of death closing in on him. And yet knowing and experiencing all that, he cried, "Lazarus, come out."

If God is that unhappy with the world as it is, why doesn't he just show up and stop it? …But that question reveals a lack of self-knowledge.
The Bible says— and we know deep down—-that so much that is wrong with the world is wrong because of the human heart…if Jesus Christ had come to earth with the sword of God's wrath against evil, none of us would have been left to tell about it.

[In John 11:38] we read it as "Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb." But this verse contains a Greek word that means "to bellow with anger," and somehow no translator feels that he or she has the freedom to say what every commentator and Greek expert says the text is saying. Jesus is absolutely furious. He's bellowing with rage—he is roaring.

I once heard a preacher say, "No one has yet discovered the word Jesus ought to have said. He is full of surprises, but they are all the surprises of perfection."