Matthew was exactly the kind of person that Zealots regarded as the scum of the earth. It is easy to imagine that Simon [the Zealot, also one of the twelve disciples] would have gladly killed Matthew with his little curved knife before Jesus came into his life.
The most curious thing about this parable [of the vineyard owner and his workers] for me is where we locate ourselves in line. The story sounds quite different from the end of the line, after all, than it does from the front of the line, but isn’t it interesting that 99 percent of us hear it from front row seats?
John Coleridge Patteson was born in 1827 and came to New Zealand to assist Bishop Selwyn. He was put in charge of the Melanesian Mission. As its bishop from 1861, he opened up the islands to the gospel, and educated Melanesians to be priests and evangelists.
It would, of course, be naïve to assume that the Synod of Whitby settled all differences in favor of Rome. Few immediate changes took place, and there was no immediate large-scale submission of the Celtic Church to the Roman. But the balance had been tipped in favor of the Roman party.
The Oxford Movement called on people to look more deeply into the institutional life of the established Church to discover its inner mystery as the Body of Christ. In reading the Tracts one discovers beneath the concern for institutional structures a deep piety and spirituality, and even more a sense that the Tractarians’ concern about institutions and their outward forms arose from what they believed about Jesus Christ as Lord of the Church.
As an old woman, Hildegard described very clearly the two different ways in which her visions presented themselves to her, in a letter to Guibert of Gembloux. (The letter caused Guibert to leave everything he was doing and become her secretary for the last few years of her life, following the death of Volmar.)
In the year of our Lord 565, when Justin, the younger, the successor of Justinian, had the government of the Roman empire, there came into Britain a famous priest and abbot, a monk by habit and life, whose name was Columba, to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts, who are separated from the southern parts by steep and rugged mountains;
Listen, I’ll tell the loveliest of dreams,
what I dreamt in the dark of night
after reason-bearers lay at rest.
It seemed I saw a wondrous tree
led aloft, wound in light,
If there is one fact about which New Testament scholars are agreed, it is that ‘the good news of the Kingdom of God’ was the heart of Jesus’ preaching. Take away the references to the Kingdom in the gospels, and there is no gospel at all. Yet it is common to hear what passes for Christianity preached without reference to the Kingdom of God.
In the mid-third century, the church led by Cyprian was defined by its opposition to a new kind of “demonically deceptive imitation” that was identified by its relative leniency toward penitent sinners and the authority granted to martyred saints and confessors.