Will Vaus

Peter Falk was an actor who spent his career playing a wide range of roles in comedy and drama. Most notably, he played an eccentric, rumpled but ever-triumphant detective in the hit television show  Columbo.  In real life, Falk had a glass eye, resulting from an operation to remove a cancerous tumor when he was three years old. Despite his missing eye, he was a high school athlete. In one story he liked to tell (after being called out at third base during a baseball game) he removed his glass eye and handed it to the umpire. “You’ll do better with this,” he said. [1]   I think we are all just a bit like Peter Falk. We would all like to think we are the best umpires of our own lives, the best judges of whether we are safe or out, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous.   However, there is someone else, who in the Gospels asserts his right to be the ultimate umpire. His name is Jesus. Let us see what he has to say about being safe or being out, clean or unclean, f...

The story is told of two boys who were good friends. One was a Catholic and the other was a Baptist. Because they were good friends, they decided to attend each other’s churches on two consecutive Sundays, with their parents’ approval.   On the first Sunday, the Baptist boy visited the Catholic Church. Just before they sat down, the Catholic boy genuflected. “What’s that mean?” the Baptist asked. All through the mass, the Baptist boy wanted to know what this and that meant, and the little Catholic boy explained everything very nicely.   The next Sunday it was the Catholic boy’s turn to visit the Baptist church. When they walked in the building, an usher handed them a printed bulletin. The little Catholic boy had never seen anything like that before in his whole life because his Catholic parish did not have bulletins. “What’s that mean?” he asked. His Baptist friend carefully explained. When the preacher stepped into the pulpit, he carefully opened his Bible and conspicuously t...

Mark Twain and his wife once visited the Holy Land. Among other places, they stayed in Tiberius on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was a moonlit night, and the weather was perfect, so Twain got the romantic idea of taking his wife for a boat ride on the lake. They walked down to the shoreline, and Twain inquired of a man sitting in a rowboat how much he would charge to row them out on the water. Twain was dressed in his usual white suit, white shoes, and white Texas hat. The oarsman, presuming him to be a wealthy rancher from the USA, said, “Well, I guess about twenty-five dollars.” Mark Twain thanked him, and, as he turned away with his wife on his arm, he was heard to exclaim, “Now I know why Jesus  walked  on the water!” [1]   Well, that is Mark Twain’s perspective on the story about Jesus we are going to read today. I would like to look with you at three more perspectives on this same story: that of Jesus, that of the disciples, and that of the crowd.   Liste...