Phillips Brooks ~ Without words

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the
Sabbath [Jesus] entered the synagogue and was teaching. And
they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as
one who had authority, and not as the scribes.
-- Mark 1:21-22 (ESV)

_______________________________________________________________

Quotation:
I read the words and ponder them, but most of all I look
at Jesus and try to understand His life, when I want to know
the fullest truth regarding God. And when thus I look at Him,
what do I learn? First of all, the true divinity of Christ
Himself. I cannot doubt what is His own conception of His own
personality. Through everything He does, through everything He
says, there shines the quiet, intense radiance of conscious
Godhead. Again, I say, it is not a word or two which He
utters, though He does say things which make known His self-
consciousness, but it is a certain sense of originalness, of
being, as it were, behind the processes of things--this is
what has impressed mankind in Jesus, and been the real power
of their often puzzled but never abandoned faith in His
Divinity. He has appeared to men, in some way, as He appears
to us today, to be not merely the channel but the fountain of
Love and Wisdom and Power, of Pity and Inspiration and Hope:
The wonderful thing about this sense of Divinity as it appears
in Jesus is its naturalness, the absence of surprise or of any
feeling of violence. (Continued tomorrow)
... Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

http://www.cqod.com/

Christian Quotation of the Day

May 4, 2007

Feast of English Saints & Martyrs of the Reformation

Meditation:
And the Pharisees were saying to him, "Look, why are they
doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" And he said to them,
"Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and
was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the
house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate
the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but
the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with
him?" And he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the
Sabbath."
-- Mark 2:24-28 (ESV)

_______________________________________________________________

Quotation:
We might have said beforehand, if we had been told that
God was coming into a man's life, ... "That must be something
very terrible and awful. That certainly must rend and tear the
life to which God comes. At least, it will separate it and
make it unnatural and strange. God fills a bush with His glory
and it burns. God enters into the great mountain, and it rocks
with earthquake. When he comes to occupy a man, He must
distort the humanity which He occupies into some inhuman
shape." Instead of that, this new life into which God comes,
seems to be the most quietly, naturally human life that was
ever seen upon the earth. It glides into its place like
sunlight. It seems to make it evident that God and man are
essentially so near together, that the meeting of their
natures in the life of a God-man is not strange. So always
does Christ deal with His own nature, accepting His Divinity
as you and I accept our humanity, and letting it shine out
through the envelope with which it has most subtly and
mysteriously mingled, as the soul is mingled with and shines
out through the body.
... Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

http://www.cqod.com/