Prayerful Clobbering the Clobber Texts

Father, when the lawyer stood before Jesus and asked, "Who is my neighbor?" he expected a safe answer — someone from his own synagogue, his own bloodline, his own side of the theological debate. Instead, Jesus told him about a Samaritan, the very person that lawyer had been trained to dismiss. We do the same thing with Scripture. We approach passages like soldiers approaching a battlefield, arming ourselves with verses to win arguments rather than kneeling before the Word to let it win us.…