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Paul Miller

In this podcast, Paul E. Miller, author of A Praying Life, invites you into a conversation about Jesus and how he lived as a person. Ministry and conversation partners, Liz Voboril and Jon H., join Paul in exploring the details of Jesus’ earthly life. In attending closely to the cadences of the one person who lived a perfect life, we gain a clearer vision of what it means to be human. Learn more about Paul Miller and his ministry at seejesus.net.

Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Paul, Robert, and Liz take a break from their conversations around the passion of Jesus to reflect on Christmas, and in particular, the story of the first live nativity, created by Francis of Assisi.
 
"Francis of Asissi was probably the first person in the church to be completely enamored with, very particularly, the person of Jesus. It just ignited his whole life. He'd been a soldier and had a breakdown after that, as a young man in his early 20s, but then became enchanted with the person of Jesus. By the time he died in his 40s, there were 30,000 Franciscans at their annual conference. His love for Jesus was transformative on the whole medieval mind. He was the first person to create a live nativity scene, and it changed how we celebrate Christmas. Because up till then the book of Matthew, with its portrayal of the wise men, was dominant in the Christmas story, and now, the shepherds came in and got some play."
 "Francis’ nativity shows what can happen if you fall in love with the person of Jesus!" 
"For Mary and Joseph, plans keep changing. I mean, they were going to get married and have a baby, as far as we know, in Nazareth, and they had to return for the census. I'm sure in their imagination they were going to have a baby in a better place and they ended up in a manger. Then were going to stay in Bethlehem and an angel came to Joseph and said, ‘Get out of here.’ They had to go to Egypt, and then, even then, they were going to return to Nazareth and the angel appeared to Joseph again. Joseph gets a lot of angel appearances, by the way!"

[SPECIAL] The First Nativity

Paul, Robert, and Liz resume the Passion series, watching Jesus at Gethsemane.
 
"What saved us from sin and brought joy to the world? It was Jesus' death on the cross. What makes Jesus' death possible? Well, it was his obedience to his father: doing his father's will. When did he set his will firmly? What was the ground zero of his obedience? It was facing the awful sadness at Gethsemane and not giving into it, resisting the temptation to run."
 "Jesus says, ‘Take this cup from me, yet not as I will, but you will.’ I love that Jesus is real about his feelings and what his feelings are pushing him to. And yet, at the same time, he's not ruled by his feelings." 
"This is the trigger for this vast explosion of the new creation. This is the spark. Because he faced his sadness, he didn't run. Because he didn't run, he stayed. Because he stayed, he suffered. Because he suffered, he died. And because he died, he took the sins of the world on himself and was resurrected as the first piece of the new creation."

[PASSION] 9. Gethsemane (POJ 5.5)

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about how Jesus loves as the cross draws near, turning their attention to the scene when Judas arrives at the garden.
 
"We can sometimes be fearful of the kind of honest command or these penetrating questions Jesus asks that unmask evil. Sin grows in the dark. And yet here they are coming in the cover of darkness, not realizing they were coming to the one who is the light of the world, who exposes every part of them."
 "Jesus is the light everywhere he goes." 
"This whole scene probably takes no more than 10 minutes. But within that time, we see Jesus moving between all these different ways of loving. He's so very present, so aware. He moves in every quadrant of love from powerfully rebuking to asking penetrating questions to protecting the disciples. It’s a beautiful portrait of Jesus loving."

[PASSION] 10. Symphony of Love (POJ 5.6)

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about how Jesus loves as the cross draws near, turning their attention to the trial scene with Pilate.
 
"Pilate is one of the people in the Gospels who we tend to see through a fairly fixed definition. The scene where he washes his hands is iconic: 'Behold, the man!' So we actually don't have a feel for him as a person. What’s this guy like? It was Edersheim’s book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, that first put me onto what’s going on in this conversation."
 "The beauty of poetry is this ability to condense infinity, and Jesus does it all the time." 
"There’s a degree to which that mocking can help us not take ourselves too seriously, but there's also a way that mocking can prevent us from taking ourselves seriously enough."

[PASSION] 11. The Trial, Part 1 (POJ 5.7)

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus before Pilate, looking at how close Jesus gets to Pilate's heart.
 
"Jesus has taken Pilate from a mocking question into opening up his heart, then he’s received more mocking from Pilate and taken him to truth. The whole thing is kind of a journey, and Pilate follows Jesus."
 "Jesus is very lamb-like, but there's a lion right behind the bushes and you can feel it." 
"Pilate was not a fearful man. He was a crafty politician. He stayed longer, up to that point, than any other of the Roman procurators, so he's got good survival instincts; but here, he's afraid. In the end, he has a choice to save his career or to save Jesus' life; and as you know, in the end, he chooses his career."

[PASSION] 12. The Trial, Part 2 (POJ 5.7)

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their slow walk through the last hours of Jesus' life, looking at Jesus and the cross.
 
"There are so many things that Jesus says that are memorable because they're pithy. 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do' is certainly one that has implanted itself in our memories. But it’s very serious. Jesus is holding back the wrath of God. They don't realize that they're crucifying an innocent man, so Jesus is showing mercy on them."
 "The only person that openly defends Jesus is a thief." 
"When Pilate said, ‘Where are you from?’ he was not asking for Jesus’ name. He knew this was Jesus of Nazareth. He wasn’t saying, ‘what's your hometown,’ but, 'are you actually God?' And of course, the main thing Pilate is mocking here is not Jesus, but the Jews, and they know it."

[PASSION] 13. The Cross, Part 1 (POJ 5.8)

Paul, Robert, and Liz finish their conversation about Jesus on the cross, slowly walking through his last seven statements.
 
"Notice how short Jesus' sentences are on the cross. He has to push himself up on his feet to catch a breath and then to be able to exhale that breath without dropping… it makes it all that much harder to talk."
 "Everything about this person is supernatural!" 
"Jesus cries out, 'It is finished!' The job is done. In John 2, Jesus tells his mother at the wedding in Cana, 'My time has not yet come.' But now the battle's over. He's done the will of his father. For the disciples, at this point, it looks like everything has gone wrong, but they'll later realize that this is a cry of triumph."

[PASSION] 14. The Cross, Part 2 (POJ 5.8)

Paul, Robert, and Liz begin looking at the first moments after the resurrection of Jesus, examining his interaction with Mary Magdalene.
 
"Mary Magdalene is the first person we know of who turns away from two angels, because they aren't helping her. She’s in pursuit, and the angels aren't helping her, so she starts looking around. We know from Luke that she had been demon-possessed, and Jesus had freed her, so what we're looking at in her single-minded focus is the depth of her love for Jesus."
 "Jesus is the first person of a new creation." 
"Sickness is going to end. Cancer is going to end. Meanness is going to end, murder is going to end, death's going to end. This is the biggest and best news in all of history, and Jesus is able to make her name and who she is as a person the center of how he shares the news with her."

[PASSION] 15. Resurrection, Part 1 (POJ 5.9)

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about the resurrection of Jesus.
 
"It was the apocryphal gospel of Peter that helped me to realize how much space Jesus left in this Resurrection scene. If you follow what the gospel of Peter says, Jesus comes back from the grave like King Kong - he fills up all the space. You can't even see his head, because it is literally up through the clouds!"
 "I want Jesus’ DNA – to ask questions, to be slow to bring judgment." 
"In the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Luke and John, Jesus is the same size as Mary. He leaves space by quietly being there until she sees him – and even then he doesn't say who he is but asks her questions. And because of that, we discover some of what Mary’s like as a person. If Jesus had identified himself immediately, we’d have missed that glimpse of Mary."

[PASSION] 16. Resurrection, Part 2 (POJ 5.9)

Paul, Robert, and Liz wrap up this study of Jesus by reflecting on what Jesus tells us about his glory... and what that means for how we follow him.
 
"We would think the glory would be the resurrection, that it would start Sunday. But Jesus says the glory starts Friday… which is just so different than how we think of glory."
 "Most of the time you only see glory in retrospect. When you're enduring quietly with no cheering crowd, that's your glory." 
"What's Jesus going to do at the wedding feast of the lamb? He's going to be the center of the feast, and he's going to also be the host and the servants. He's going to be around checking people, checking their drinks, serving food. He just loves to love. He loves to wash feet."

[PASSION] 17. The Glory of Jesus (POJ 5.11)

In this episode, recorded late last Spring, Paul, Jon and Liz reflect on some aspects of the "A Praying Church" material that resonated in recent conversations and events. 
“We bring our bad praying and our secularism to the Old Testament and so we miss some of the richness of prayer there. One practical reason is because while in the New Testament prayer is generally just called ‘prayer,’ in the Old Testament, you have this really rich variety of language that covers the range of what it is to be human before God.”
 “Prayer is not central. God is central.” 
“Secularism is pervasive. It’s a mindset that makes functionally prayer as a window dressing… I love to pray these gigantic kingdom prayers and ask questions, because it lets you see the story unfold. It’s just fascinating what God does. It’s just a lot more interesting though than what I would come up with."

[ROUND-UP] 1. Prayer in the Old Testament, Praying Our Questions, & the Influence of Secularism

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