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As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.
Rowan Williams
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the transformative mission of Jesus in relation to the community of believers.

Rowan Williams discusses how the gospels portray Jesus's mission as one that redefines and revitalizes the community of God's followers, particularly the Jewish people, who initially received the divine law and covenant. This highlights the idea that Jesus's presence and teachings serve to reshape the identity and purpose of this community in accordance with a new understanding of faith and relationship with the divine.

Themes

JesusCommunityTransformationFaithCovenant

In practice

Example use cases

During a sermon about community building in the church.

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It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
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Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
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Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
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Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
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Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.
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A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.
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