How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?
As soon as people understand what crucifixion means, the cross becomes offensive.
This is the third installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”

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To a world enslaved to time (because it has no future), the Church's disregard for clocks and calendars is ridiculous.
This is an excerpt from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), written by Martin Luther and translated by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2018).
The resurrection of Jesus was the moment when the one true God appointed the Man through whom the whole cosmos would be brought back into its proper order. A man got us into this mess; the Man would get it out again.
Preaching the end times purposes to solicit and strengthen faith in the Savior of the world who is at the same time the Creator and Re-creator of the world.
Faithful preachers should remain steadfast in the biblical categories and terminology and preach the reality of death.
We give thanks to the Lord for His victory over death and the grave both for those who are now with Him in glory and for ourselves even as we press forward in faithfulness awaiting the Day when our eyes will see Him.
Jesus breaks through our barriers in His beatitudes. He shatters our conceptions of the blessed life and opens the Kingdom of God to all people.
Christians are in a unique position to show the world something truly other-worldly. We are free from living in our world as if it contained all there is.
From mountain to mountain, from meal to meal the LORD God points us to His banquet, already prepared; the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which shall have no end!
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
If our churches are split along generational lines it's because we've turned our backs to the cross. We've shut our ears to the Good News about Jesus Christ, who judges the world with equity.