"Mystery" suggests that what we believe defies reason and common sense. What we believe does defy reason and common sense; but yet I believe what Christians believe is the most reasonable and commonsense account we can have of the way things are.
"Mystery" does not name a puzzle that cannot be solved. Rather, "mystery" names that which we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to rethink everything we think we know.
It is my conviction that explanations, i.e., the attempt to make Jesus conform to our understanding of things, cannot help but domesticate and tame the wildness of the God we worship as Christians.
The hardness and difficulty (of the meditations on the words of Jesus from the cross) comes from how painful it is for us to acknowledge the reality of the Father's sacrifice of the Son on the cross.
Sentimentality is the attempt to make the gospel conform to our needs, to make Jesus Christ our "personal" savior, to make the suffering of Christ on the cross but an instant of general unavoidable suffering. (We need to) avoid our sinful temptation to make Jesus's words from the cross to be all about us.
Theology is a servant discipline in the church, that, like all such disciplines, can be used by those called to practice the discipline to acquire power over those the servant is meant to serve. As a result, what the theologian has to say about the scripture becomes more important than the scripture itself.
Theology is the delicate art necessary for the Christian community to keep its story straight. That story consists of beliefs and behavior that are actions required by the content of the story. The work of theology is, therefore, never finished. (It) can never be finished not only because we live in a world of change but, more important, because the story we tell resists any premature closure. (T)he seven words of Jesus from the cross forces us to acknowledge that the past is not the past until it has been redeemed, the present cannot be confidently known except in the light of such a redemption, and the future exists only in the hope made possible by the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
I believe with all my heart that the constant temptation to betray the gospel, a temptation amply displayed by the history of the church, cannot be resisted in our day by Christians trying to imitate the false humility of tolerance.
It is only because God is most determinatively revealed in "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" that Christians are forbidden from ever assuming they possess rather than are possessed by the God they worship.
(From the words of Jesus on the cross) I was forced to discover, how extraordinary it is that our lives have been redeemed, literally made possible, by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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