We are switching gears this holiday season. For the last couple months our focus has been on a Jerusalem construction site, but now it is shifting to a certain Jewish carpenter/rabbi/messiah born some 400+ years after Nehemiah arrived with his blueprints - because if the holidays are about anything, they ought to be about Jesus.
Our source material will be the Gospel of Luke, a guy who was probably a trained physician and took up journalism as a hobby. Perhaps we should think of Luke as the blogger-done-good, snagging a WordPress account one day for the simple purpose of posting his findings about Jesus so that his buddy Theo would buy into it - and then ending up world-famous. Heck, the book of Acts was also written by him and in modern terms would count as an exercise in live-blogging.
Anyway, we have the two big holidays coming up, my two personal favorites, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know this sounds harsh, but Halloween enthusiasts be damned - you have no clue what a real holiday is and may well be seeing a lot more dudes with devil horns in the afterlife than you do at your favorite costume party. I know that’s harsh and over-dramatic, but I don’t care, because to me there is nothing that reminds me more of Jesus than a gigantic Thanksgiving dinner or a green tree that gives birth to multi-colored gifts on the 25th of December.
Where am I going with this…Ah, yes, the holidays are about Jesus, and so we seek to plumb the depths of that connection during this holiday season. Our survey of Luke will be done, as the shreds would say, switch - from the end to the beginning. And the simple reason is that there is no cause for thanksgiving greater than the death of Christ and no gift imaginable greater than His birth.
Prepare for the first study in our series, Riding Switch Through Luke: knowing Jesus from omega to alpha (and back again)…
