Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Jesus doesn't say he's troubled in spirit. John, who is just to his right, picks it up. If you are aware of someone—you love them, or you are just an astute observer of people—you can tell when they are anxious. I think this is one of three references that John has to Jesus' anxiety. And they are all surrounding the passion. What I love about it is that it normalizes anxiety. So much of our modern world either tries to escape anxiety or feels guilty about it. But Jesus was anxious." "If you are a lover of people, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the biblical love, it's going to lead you into tension." "What I love about this whole scene [when Judas and the Jewish leaders arrive at Gethsemane], is that when you put it all together, Jesus is like Bruce Lee or Jason Bourne. Everything's a weapon. He's rebuking, loving, protecting, challenging, healing, commanding. He is the prince of peace. So this person that we saw all agitated is in complete command of himself. Even now he's probably feeling anxiety, but he's not trapped by his emotions. He is a vibrant lover of the people around him. And that's what makes the passion so beautiful. The camera has moved to slow motion on Jesus life we can see incident after incident where Jesus is loving, rebuking, caring, comforting, lamenting. He's showing us what it is to be a person."

"God in his wisdom is kind of bringing a poverty on the entire world. It's striking, especially in America. We have a Declaration of Independence so it's written in to our seminal documents that we should not be constricted by anybody. And yet God is constricting us." "I'm not saying the virus is a beautiful thing, but all suffering for those of us who are in Christ can be drawn up into the dying of Jesus." "The only way he can make us weak is to overload all our well-oiled systems. And that's what's happening in all of our lives to different extents. And we are surrounded by people who are also overloaded. People are losing their work, coming under financial stress. So it's not only something that teaches us to love, it opens up doors, opportunities to love."

In this episode, we look at how Jesus' sadness as he nears the cross is another window into his personhood. "It really is true that Jesus is present. He's present with not only their rejection of him but with himself. He's comfortable being sad. And I don't think as Christians we're that comfortable or we hear much teaching on the negative emotions." "It's just a remarkable window into Jesus heart that he's looking outside of himself at a time like this." "One of the neat things about Jesus' sadness is that he doesn't get self-entangled. That is, if there's a problem in Christianity with stoicism, in the broader culture there's increasingly this problem of getting self-entangled in your grief. If emotions can be a bit suppressed within Christianity, within the broader culture they have almost become sacred."

This episode begins a new series on Jesus' Passion by looking at how the disciples want to go higher, but Jesus is focused on going lower. "James and John get their mother to try to get them the number 1 and 2 places in the Kingdom. And the other disciples don't say 'You know I don't think that is Jesus way.' They are just mad that James and John beat them to it! They are all fighting for the top. But Jesus is remarkably gentle through the whole thing. The disciples are functionally Epicureans—hunting for the shortcut across the 'J' of the J-Curve. That's our natural desire." "The disciples want suffering-free glory and Jesus says it doesn't exist." "One of my favorite phrases from Jesus in Luke 15 is where Jesus says take the lower place. I just love that. There is an act of the will where you take the lower place. You are deciding that you are going to go lower. I just think the opportunities that we have to do that at the big and the small level are enormous. It's as simple as a moment in conversation at the family table, letting someone else interrupt me so my idea takes the lower place..."

This episode wraps up our series on J-Curve: Union with Christ by looking at how the J-Curve helps in a mini-crisis. "The Apostle Paul introduces the J-Curve as a kind of a master story 'let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 2:5). And then he describes the downward journey of Jesus all the way to death on a cross." "Every community has a narrative." "The J-Curve normalizes the bumps. There's a kind of perfectionism now in our culture that sort of demands that life should be bump free. Paul the Apostle is a perfectionist, but his perfectionism is in his ability to reenact the dying and rising of Christ. It's the perfection of love. It's the perfection of faith. And it's not in my situation. So it allows me to have this calm center in all kinds of circumstances."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "When we think of idolatry we think about how it affects our relationship vertically with God and that is obvious and good but we're not necessarily attentive to how it affects the horizontal relationship with those around us." "Ministry is particularly subtle idol because it's got Jesus written all over it." "Paul sits on the word 'know' in Philippians 3. Because in the J-Curve you get to know Jesus in ways you would never have known him through teaching or study. The good shepherd gets very close to you in the dying because it's his story. It's his spirit and his presence. So Jesus becomes your friend in the dying."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "You can see two different loves operating here. Field hockey is a lesser love, but it is still a valid love. It was taking more time and energy than my greater love for Emily to know Jesus. But nevertheless, that greater love was shaping how I responded to failures in the lesser love." "There's this whole world of lesser loves that are just delightful. Becoming like Jesus is not the dissolution of those lesser loves, but them rightly ordered." "My imagination was captured by the idea that I wanted Emily to be in Jesus. I knew that the way to become in Jesus was to travel his journey and out of that would come resurrection. And it worked! It's so powerful! It was an imaginative vision of the beauty of Jesus coming into my family that had been mastering me for some 20 years."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "My sister Rosanne got into Wellesley College and she came back on Thanksgiving vacation and said 'Paul, you could get into Harvard.' She didn't have to say that twice. I heard that once and I was planning my life..." "We are all 'in' something. 'In Christ' is mystical, but it's remarkably unmystical as well. "If you teach justification by faith and the atonement separate from this really rich idea that that I am in Koinonia with Jesus then you answer the question at the beginning of Romans 6 badly. The answer in Romans 6 to the problem of selfishness and the Christian life is that our union with Christ is an embodiment in which we continually reenact His life of love, and that leads to suffering and a life of repentance."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking closer at what we tend to do instead of the J-Curve: marketing ourselves and trying to climb the failure-boasting chart. "The word "boast" the way Paul uses it in Philippians 3 is bigger than our English word. It also includes glory and rejoicing. So, when your favorite sports team wins, you glory in that sports team. The concept gets right at the heart of how our flesh operates." "When I was silent in that meeting, it put to death something evil in me – my boasting self. I felt the pain of that." "A lot of people are quiet – they don't boast – but Paul is not so much talking about what you say, but about the boasting self. If you are critical, that's a form of boasting. You're bringing someone down. Gossip is the boasting self. You're sharing information about someone else that quietly lifts you up. So many of our sins rotate around this desire to move up the failure-boasting chart!"

This episode explores the idea that gift-giving is deep in the structure of the universe... reflecting the heart of our gift-giving God. "You're driving in heavy traffic, and someone coming from the opposite direction wants to make a left-hand turn in front of you. To let them do that might cost you missing a traffic light. You can see from their turn signal that they are requesting a gift. And, in most cases, what do you do? You give them a gift of time. They wave their acknowledgement and you nod in exchange. Though there's no takeaway for either of us, we both walk away satisfied." "It's like you're touching the structure of the universe which is the mind of God: all of life is gift.." "I don't know if I've ever heard anyone connect the structure of the universe with a left turn! But it's kind of hopeful because if you see things in this way that it's not like you have to go and move across the world to engage in the deep structure of the universe. It's built into everyday life it if we see it and receive it as well as give it."

This episode continues our series on Paul's latest book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "As Americans we have a whole declaration of no limitations, but the very nature of love is to have your freedom constricted. What we'll react to sometimes in a difficult relationship to the feel of the relationship—I have to be careful what I say around the person, it's unfair, it's unbalanced. Life shouldn't feel this way. But that's actually the feel of love, that narrowing, the constricting, the limiting. "That's the womb where resurrection takes place—it's where you get to know Jesus." "When people recoil from the narrowing of love it narrows their hearts. If you want to see someone who has a wide heart, they've experienced narrowing. It's like the heat of that forms the human soul the way it should be."

This episode begins a new series on Paul's latest book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "The American church is like me at the back of the plane, at many levels, thinking everything has gone wrong. And part of what has gone wrong is that we don't really have any teaching on dying and rising with Jesus." "We're missing a significant piece of Christianity." "One of the difficulties of suffering of any kind is that it is disorienting. You lose your way. It feels devoid of meaning. What the J-Curve does is bring hope to it, because dying is not the last word, and it gives you a toolkit of what to do when you find yourself in a patch of suffering. Available wherever you listen: iTunes | Spotify | Android | Google Podcasts

This episode wraps up our conversation about how Jesus became a missing person. "Secular-liberalism itself is no longer aware of its Jesus roots. What it's done now is still hold on to Jesus, but no longer as a person, just his attributes." "Political correctness is simply Jesus' attributes, secularized." "One of the big passions of my life is for the church, and for our youth in particular, to experience an embodied Jesus. When that happens, they are inoculated against the siren call of Secular-liberalism and they can out-compassion Secular-liberalism because Secular-liberalism does not have the spirit of Jesus. A virtual Jesus haunts our culture, but we have the real thing!"

This episode continues our conversation about how Jesus became a missing person. "In classical Greek literature, people are defined by their central characteristic. Achilles in the Iliad is swift; he is swift Achilles. Everything he does is swift. Erich Auerbach* compares that to Jacob. If you look at Jacob, in the first part of his life he's just a scoundrel. He's crafty. If he was in the Iliad, he would be crafty Jacob. But, as Robert Alter* puts it, Jacob, like so many other Bible characters is a 'center of surprise.' Jacob actually changes." "Emotions made Stoics nervous. If you've been in an argument lately, you know why." "The Jewish love of the physical meant that they could affirm Jesus' humanity but not his divinity. The Greek mind was the inverse of this. Jesus' divinity was easy for the Greeks to see; it was his humanity that they struggled with. In the fake gospel of Judas, Judas—because he loves Jesus—gives Jesus over to be crucified so Jesus can be rid of his body. That's the Greek mind, it didn't like the body." Available wherever you listen: iTunes | Spotify | Android | Google Podcasts *See Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative.

In this episode, we begin a conversation about why paying attention to how Jesus interacts as a person feels so strange and unfamiliar to many of us. "When it comes to repentance and holiness, it's almost like we're good at the dying—at sin identification—but the resurrection, the beauty formation, is weak. If we don't have a vision of the person of Jesus, then our beauty formation is without content. It just ends up being good or being nice." "Why is this glowing diamond sitting at the center of our faith, the person of Jesus, so hidden?" "Repentance and faith are absolutely critical to the Christian life. But sometimes it can feel like an endless idol hunt, like if you're really a devoted Christian, you're always seeking deeper recesses of your heart. In some ways, that is true, but if that's not balanced out by a positive vision of the image of Jesus being imprinted on me, then it actually is kind of depressing. As you become more like Christ, you're constantly looking out, so you don't get so self-entangled. At the heart of love is a self-forgetfulness."

In this episode, we look at how Jesus greets Mary Magdalene in John 20. "Jesus is the same person pre-resurrection and post-resurrection. I think I could pick him out at a party. I'd look around and hunt for the person who is being quietly attentive to someone who is unimportant. That would be Jesus!" "'Mary!'" It's so Jesus to say that. It's pure poetry! It's so short, but yet filled with so much." "These two snippets about Mary tell us a lot about her. What immediately comes to mind for me is this long history of strong Hebrew women – there is no one like these women in ancient literature: Sarah, Rebecca, Abigail, Ruth, Jael, Deborah...."

In this episode, we interview Tyler Johnson, Lead Pastor of Redemption Church in Arizona, about how seeing Jesus has made a difference in his life. "The biggest thing that pressing into Jesus has cultivated in me is the need to depend more on the Father through prayer…" "Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived." "If we saw a middle-aged man in Starbucks talking to his father, and saying what Jesus said in John 5:19, 'Dad, I don't do anything unless I see you do it. If you don't do it, I don't do it,' we would think this guy needs to grow up… he's got daddy issues, whatever. But that is how Jesus lived, and that's how Jesus loved." Available wherever you listen: iTunes | Spotify | Android | Google Podcasts

In this episode, we reflect on the two scenes studied thus far and begin to see some of the elements of Jesus' beauty that captivate us. "Jonathan Edwards said Jesus combines 'divine excellencies as otherwise would have seemed to us utterly incompatible in the same subject.' When you see opposites like compassion and honesty come together in a person, it's just striking and you're drawn to that. It touches your soul." "When you watch Jesus, you begin to sense that he has a center outside of himself. It's like a gyroscope – an internal stabilizing device. What you're looking at when you see this in Jesus is his prayer life with his Father..." ""For us, I think this is where the gift of the Holy Spirit comes in. You can study Jesus until you are blue in the face, but you're always left with, 'Lord, I don't know how to do this.' And so we pray to the Father for the Spirit, who brings Christ to us."

In this episode, we continue our study of Jesus' conversation with Pilate in John 18. "Jesus enters Pilate's world. It's not like Jesus is just witnessing to Pilate. He is doing that, but it is inseparable from incarnating, entering his world." "Love moves toward people." "Jesus forbears. It's one of the fruits of the spirit, usually translated as patience, but a better translation would be forbearance. It's the activity of absorbing someone's evil. If forgiveness erases the guilt, forbearance absorbs the pain of the sin… What forgiveness and forbearance do is they clear the playing field for love."

In this episode, we continue our study of Jesus' conversation with Pilate in John 18.

In this episode, we shift our focus to Jesus' conversation with Pilate in John 18. "Pilate asks Jesus, 'Are you the King of the Jews?' Almost everybody takes that at face value, but it is almost certainly a mock. Let's think about it. Everyone in this situation knows Jesus is not the King of the Jews ... Pilate is mocking Jesus. After this scene, the joke, 'Is Jesus King of the Jews?' goes all through the narrative." "For guys in particular, the faux intimacy of mocking can give the illusion that we're close when we aren't and keep us from developing genuine intimacy; it can even begin to redefine intimacy as mocking."

In this episode, we conclude our study of John 13 by looking at the theme of perfection.

In this episode, we return to our study of the foot-washing in John 13, focusing on Peter's response.

In this episode, Paul shares some reflections on friendship, on occasion of the death of his good friend David Powlison on June 7, 2019.

In this episode, we look at the footwashing in John 13. Paul draws our attention to a number of details in story, including Jesus' silence, the vivid details, and the effect of Jesus's beauty and humility on John even 50 years after the event. We then consider the ancient triad of goodness, truth and beauty, and how a deeper discovery of Jesus as a person might strengthen the church's witness in goodness and beauty.

In this episode, Paul Miller shares how a question from his wife, "Do you love me?" launched him into a study of the person of Jesus... and how what he saw changed him.