Multicultural Ministry Matters

The school I attended in Sri Lanka is St Thomas’ College . I reckon history has been unkind to St Thomas. Despite the adjective usually attached to his name – “doubting” Thomas – I reckon he’s actually a good model for a believer. That is, if you follow the correct Thomas. The world is a big place. We can’t possibly travel everywhere & experience everything. So how do we gain reliable information about the world? Through people telling us what it’s like. When they tell us what it’s like, we can share some of their experiences. We can see what they see, hear what they hear, and thereby come to a reliable knowledge of whatever it is they’re telling us about. That works through time – we know history through the records of witnesses – and in contemporary time – people share their experiences with us. And that’s the same way we can know about Jesus rising from the dead: through the testimony of the eyewitnesses. That’s the challenge Thomas faced. John 20:24-25 (NIV 1984): 24 Now Thomas...

This follows on from my previous post on Jesus, the radical reformer . John 2:18-22: 18 Then the Jews demanded of him, “What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” 20 The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” 21 But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken . The risen body of Jesus is the one true temple – the one place where God and man con come together in peace and harmony. Jesus had taken charge of the temple. He was controlling the place, and dictating what true worship was. The Jewish leaders ask him: what right have you to do that? They want him to perform a miracle, to prove that he has the right to take over the place, and dictate true wo...

John 2:14-16: 14 In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15 So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!” 17 His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” When we read the account of Jesus clearing the temple, we instinctively cheer him on. But Jesus’ actions are actually rather strange. Because when we look carefully, we can see that this market was originally set up to help people worship God, not get in the way of it. The merchants were selling “cattle, sheep and doves” (v14). They are sacrificial animals. God specifically permitted people to purchase sacrificial animals on site: Deuteronomy 14:24-26 24 But if that place [the central place of wor...