Recent Posts

Archive

Tags

Christian DNA

Here’s an interesting fact. Actually it’s not very interesting at all, but allows me to use it as an illustration: the fact that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA in the same year this church was rebuilt – 1953. On the face of it, 1 John shouldn’t be too difficult to cope with. Grammatically it’s very simple, with a limited vocabulary. So that it’s the first text students of NT Greek learn to translate. You find the same words and phrases repeating over and over again. Which makes you wonder where it’s all going. And whether, in fact, the whole isn’t rather less than the sum of its parts. But that’s where Watson and Crick come in. If you analy

Forgiveness

(Matthew 18, 21-35) I woke up last Monday morning to hear the radio announcing that it was the 16th anniversary of 9/11. I remembered watching the television as the planes smashed into the twin towers – and, knowing that my son was in New York, sitting frozen until his wife phoned to say he was safe. In the clearing up of Ground Zero, you may remember, one of the firemen made what appeared to be a remarkable discovery – a page from the bible, burned and fused onto a fragment of steel girder. It was open at the sermon on the Mount where Jesus speaks about forgiveness. You may remember, this was later proved to be a clever hoax but it underlined the subject of forgiveness. It doesn’t detract f