The scene with Jesus starts pretty much the same way. In a sense Jesus, through the illustrations he uses throws out the security the people of Israel had had up until then. The religious people stopped listening to Jesus because they didn t like his message, but the disenfranchised came in droves. In Thomas Long s story, the religious students left calling the preacher a heretic and blasphemer, but on the successive evenings, the others began to come the ones who never thought of themselves as religious the ones who needed to hear about God s love and forgiveness for the first time. We, as a people of faith, must walk a difficult line.
Words do have incredible power, especially the words of scripture.
But we must not just concern ourselves with only the words printed on the pages. We must be about living out the word of God in our lives. That means living into the intent of those words their history and context as well as their content. This fact became real to me as I went from church to church doing interim ministry. I used to rebel when people quoted scripture to me out of context, especially Paul.