Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.

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Consolation is the breath of life filling our lungs, hearts, and minds with the fresh, incorruptible air of the new creation.
True preaching arises when the Holy Spirit steeps the proclaimer in its own cycle of judgment and mercy.
Early in the church’s life, some Christians were dragged before the city authorities in Thessalonica and accused of “turning the world upside down,” (Acts 17:6). They were guilty as charged. They were turning the world upside down. Or, rather, they were putting the world right side up.
The Confessions instead look forward and provide a critique of the world and of all my various religions and idolatries.
All other wonderful teachings of Holy Scripture from creation to Christ’s coming again are absolutely worthless without being understood in light of Jesus, death, and resurrection for sinners.
Jesus is in the business of proclaiming such a beautiful redundancy.
God is the God of failures, for He became one for you. There is no failure of ours that is bigger than Jesus’ cross, no sin of ours that can overshadow the cross.
There is a difference between preaching about Christ and preaching Christ.
Mordor’s bleak existence and the successful salvific mission of Frodo and Samwise is what makes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings such a psychologically enjoyable epic.
Jesus is the great Houdini of the grave for us. And through His death, He gives us the Great Escape from death that leads to the great joy of the Resurrection.
The absence of a feeling is not the absence of Christ, but as emotional, rational, and spiritual beings, we cannot say that the presence of Christ necessitates the absence of emotion.
A good place to start is to work hard at loving those no one else seems to love. I can’t think of a more Christ-like action.