Unsullied love. Only one act of pure love, unsullied by any taint of ulterior motive, has ever been performed in the history of the world, namely the self-giving of God in Christ on the cross for undeserving sinners. That is why, if we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary. --- John R.W. Stott

Held in high honor. Even in other religions and ideologies Jesus is held in high honour. Hindus would gladly recognize him as an 'avatar' (descent) of Vishnu, and so assimilate him into Hinduism, if only he would renounce his exclusive claims. Jews who reject Jesus as their Messiah have never lost interest in him. Their scholars write books about him, and their hostility has often been more to Gentile anti-Semitism than to Jesus himself.

Radical and conservative. It is not sufficiently understood that our Lord Jesus Christ was at one and the same time a conservative and a radical although in different spheres. There is no question that he was conservative in his attitude to Scripture. 'The Scripture cannot be broken', he said, 'I did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them.' Again, 'not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished' (Jn. 10:35; Mt. 5:17-18).

He dropped it like a bombshell on the Anglican Communion on Wednesday. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby proposed a way forward for the Communion to effectively dissolve the fractious and bitterly divided worldwide Anglican Communion and replace it with a much looser grouping.