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Showing posts from August, 2013

Call your Christian Leaders to account

Sabbath  How does God teach us to live well? What is the relationship of Christianity to Jewish law? These two questions come up continually in Scripture as Christianity is a religion in strong relationship to Judaism and in dialogue with it. Following God’s commandments and being faithful to God is always tied in Jewish scripture to well being. If you follow the law: feed the hungry, care for the afflicted, stop speaking evil, then: ‘you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail’. Jesus’ frustration with members of the Jewish religious elite is that they focus on custom and ritual and ignore the reason for the law – the well being of God’s people. Jesus says to the leader of the synagogue, 'but you will let your animals have water on the Sabbath and yet you will deny this woman healing on the Sabbath? You hypocrites!' The Sabbath is meant to bring life, to enable the Jewish people to focus on God’s law so that a socie