If you want to see the kind of spectrum of emotion that a discussion of The Words of Jesus can evoke, go to http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/mar/13/bold-radical-jesus-comes-alive-in-his-words/?feed and look at the “Comments” that follow James Dowd’s copy.

I had a much loved uncle, dead now these many years, who for half a century practiced medicine in rural northwestern Tennessee. One of my favorite “Uncle Cay” stories was a tale he told about his first week of practice when he was called to a sharecropper’s house to deliver a baby. Never having seen a human birth before–medical training in the early 20th century was not quite what it is today–never having attended a human birth before, he said he absolutely panicked the minute he heard his patient screaming. The more she screamed, he said, the more terrified he became, until it dawned on him that anything making that much noise was not going to die, so he’d better just ignore the screaming and deal with the situation.

 There’s a good deal of practical wisdom in that approach, I suspect.

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