28 Quotes by Derek Flood

We are confronted with our ugliness and hatefulness, and at the same time we see that God incarnate, rather than coming in wrath, is bearing that hurt for us.

Scripture is only read right when it is read in a way that leads us to a Jesus-shaped life and a Jesus-shaped understanding of God’s heart.

Many, if not most first-century Jews expected the messiah to be a man of war, and for the liberation to come through violent force. We see this reflected in the disciples’ own expectations for Jesus. Jesus, however, did not come to take life, but to give his own life. The gospel is indeed about the messiah’s “victory” over evil and injustice, but that messianic victory does not come through violent conquest and military force, but through restoration and healing.

Jesus begins with the call to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves,” and then pushes us to expand our definition of “neighbor” to encompass those we would normally reject and shut out.

So while it is true that he is thus fulfilling the law in the sense of bringing it to its ultimate goal, the way he is doing this is by overturning the very system of retributive justice embodied in the law, and replacing it with the superior way of God’s restorative justice rooted in the enemy love that Jesus came to demonstrate with his teaching and life.

The Bible was never intended to be our master, placing a burden on our back; it was intended to act as a servant, leading us to love God, others, and ourselves. When we read it in a way that leads to the opposite of this, we get it wrong.

There is frankly no other theme that made Jesus quite as furious as seeing people hurt in the name of religion.

Reading on a trajectory thus means recognizing that what we find in the New Testament is not a final unchangeable eternal ethic, but rather the first major concrete steps away from the dominant religious and political narrative which understood oppression and violence as virtuous, and towards a better way rooted in compassion.

There is nothing wrong with correctly understanding what a text is saying. The problem is when this focus on correct interpretation becomes primary, and love takes a backseat, the focus being placed on “being right” and “orthodox” at the expense of love.