Preacher: Sue
Readings: Matt 5:17-22, 27-32 & 43-45, Matt 12:9-21, Matt 19:23-26 (see below for text)
So today we continue our sermon series on Jesus in the four gospels. And you will probably have figured out by now that the gospel for today is… Matthew.
Apart from reading through Matthew a couple of times, I also spent an evening with Peter re-watching Pasolini’s 1964 film, The Gospel According to Matthew. According to one website, this shows “a socially-committed, quasi-Marxist version of the Gospel preached by a harsh and uncompromising Christ who was in many ways a revolutionary and a provocateur not unlike Pasolini himself”.
Which takes me nicely to my starting point for this sermon. Pasolini painted a Christ “not unlike Pasolini himself”. And in trying to figure out what kind of Jesus Matthew’s gospel presents, I’ve found it hard to disentangle Matthew from Jesus. Is Matthew’s Jesus in fact “not unlike Matthew himself”? Is it, for instance, Matthew or Jesus who is preoccupied with the ways Jesus fulfils OT prophecy? Is it Jesus who is so keen on righteousness or is it Matthew?
Well, fortunately for us all, we have four gospels and four perspectives on the story and person of Jesus. In her very helpful introduction, Emily reminded us that we create our stories together, from our different memories, perspectives and interests. And the four gospel writers each have their own background, their own experience, their own questions and interests, their own intended audience. They highlight different aspects of Jesus’ life, knitting the strands together in different patterns.
But before we look at Matthew’s picture of Jesus, let’s deal with “Matthew” the evangelist. Who wrote this gospel? Well, there’s an early tradition that it was the apostle Matthew, but his name isn’t attached to the earliest manuscripts. And there are some reasons for thinking it wasn’t him. The gospel is usually dated after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 and long enough after Mark wrote his gospel for a copy to have reached Matthew, maybe somewhere between 75 & 85AD. The apostle Matthew would have been pretty old by then, though it’s possible that he was still alive. Apparently there are a few misunderstandings of Jewish customs and literature, suggesting the writer may not have been Jewish – as Matthew was. (For instance the author tells us that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey with her foal in tow, to fulfil a prophecy “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey”, whereas someone familiar with Hebrew parallelism might have taken the prophecy as a poetic reference to just one donkey so wouldn’t have needed the foal to tag along too.)
Like Luke, Matthew draws heavily on Mark’s gospel and for me a more telling argument against the apostle’s authorship is that even the account of the conversion & call of Matthew is pretty much lifted verbatim from Mark. If I was using someone else’s accounts as one of my sources, I think I would want to write more personally when it came to the one bit where I was centre of attention.
So, it’s probably safest to say we don’t know exactly who the author of Matthew’s gospel is – but I’ll continue to call him Matthew anyway. There is a consensus that he was writing for Jews who were being persecuted for following Jesus.
But what about the central character in this book? What can we say of Jesus in this gospel?
Well, perhaps the first thing that strikes me is the position of Matthew’s gospel in our bible. It’s the first book of the NT & as such follows straight on from the last book of the OT. And the OT looms large in Matthew’s story. His genealogy of Jesus gives us a bird’s eye view of the whole of Jewish history from Abraham to Jesus, neatly divided into 3 chunks each of 14 generations, from Abraham to King David, from David to the exile in Babylon and from Babylon to Jesus.
Matthew shows Jesus’ significance in the story of Israel by having him round off the third chunk of fourteen generations. He also includes three women. In the midst of all the men we also find Rahab and Ruth, both Gentiles and Rahab a prostitute. So perhaps Matthew is saying: “don’t get all sniffy about the rumours you may have heard that Mary was pregnant with Jesus before she was married – we’ve had the whiff of scandal in our history before and Rahab and Ruth turned out to be great grandmother and great great grandmother to our great king David”.
And throughout the rest of the gospel the author is always at our elbow ready to point out that what Jesus has just said or done was “to fulfil what had been spoken through” some prophet. Maybe sometimes this is Matthew making sure we’ve noticed, as for instance when Joseph takes Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt so that Hosea’s prophecy can be fulfilled when they are called back “out of Egypt”. But maybe sometimes this is a window into Jesus’ own thinking. In the reading we heard today, perhaps it was indeed meditation on the words of Isaiah that inspired Jesus to reach out to the bruised reeds and smouldering wicks of humanity he encountered yet to seek to do so gently and without fanfare.
Although Matthew stresses continuity with the OT, his story of Jesus is something new and different too. Jesus is the longed for Messiah, the son of David, the long-awaited king – but without the nationalism and militarism. He is a prophet – but not any old prophet, not just a servant of God faithful enough to be described in traditional Hebrew terms as a son of God. Matthew is at pains to make clear that Jesus is THE Son of God, declared so by a voice from heaven at his baptism and the transfiguration.
Of course Jesus’ own relationship with the OT is complex. He’s steeped in scripture and uses it, for instance, to put the devil in his place when he tempts Jesus in the wilderness. In our first reading he tells his listeners: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.” And yet moments later he seems to be setting aside the law with the repeated formula “You have heard that it was said… But I say to you …”
I think there are two ways of reading this. One is to say that what Jesus is addressing is not what is written, the law itself, but what has been said about it over the generations. In a later chapter (ch 23), Jesus accuses the scribes and the Pharisees of making the law too burdensome. And there are several examples of the opposite too, like divorce which is OK so long as you give your wife a certificate of divorce, or the written commandment to love our neighbour which in popular tradition has somehow morphed into “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy”.
The law legislates for murder. Jesus is concerned about all broken and strained relationships, even about unvoiced anger in our hearts. The law wants us to tell the truth under oath, Jesus wants us to tell the truth always and keep our promises. In short, Jesus wants us to “be perfect … as [our] heavenly Father is perfect”. To which my first response is “but that’s impossible” (and as Veronica pointed out in her sermon on Jesus in Luke’s gospel, Luke’s version seems a lot less scary – “Be merciful as your Father is merciful”). But some of you will already be right there with a retort from Matthew 19’s story of the rich man for whom it is impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven - "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."
Because Matthew’s Jesus can also be understanding, comforting and tender. In the first chapter Matthew links Jesus with Isaiah’s prophecy “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us.” Jesus promises that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am with them”. And the gospel closes with another promise of with-ness: “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
And the God who is with us knows us and cares about us. Jesus encourages his disciples to address God as “Father”, to pray to “our Father in heaven” knowing and trusting that our heavenly Father “knows what [we] need before [we] ask him” and that he values us more than many sparrows, none of whom falls to the ground without him noticing (ch 6 & 10).
When the disciples fail Jesus is quick to forgive. For instance Peter urges Jesus not to go to Jerusalem to “undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed”. Jesus responds with a stinging rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”(ch 16) But just a few verses later Jesus is hand picking 3 disciples to accompany him up a high mountain (where he will be transfigured) – and Peter is among them. And when Peter and the others are scared out of his wits, Jesus doesn’t scold them for their lack of understanding but touches them – this seems such an affectionate, tender moment to me – and tells them not to be afraid. (ch 17) Later Jesus describes Jerusalem as “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it ” AND then in the same breath says that he has often longed to gather her children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. So alongside the fierce purity of Jesus’ life and ethical teaching there is also the tender affection of a friend and a parent.
So let’s look a little more closely at the fierceness of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. If you search through the gospels for examples of Jesus’ teaching about people or things being thrown into fire or outer darkness you’ll find, if I’ve counted correctly, two or three of these references in Luke, one in Mark and one in John but many in Matthew.
What are we to make of this kind of language? And why does Matthew insist on it more than the other gospels?
Well, this is probably a sermon topic in its own right so I will just make a few observations. Firstly, the images of fire and darkness sometimes occur in parables where the main point is not to tell us in detail what awaits a person who, for instance, doesn’t feed the hungry, give the thirsty a drink, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick or visit those in prison but to point us towards right behaviour – to urge us to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and so on.
Secondly Matthew is shaped by the literary traditions of the time, including those of apocalyptic literature (like Revelation & parts of Daniel for instance) where the style of these passages would fit well.
I came across an interesting comment on the parable about weeds sown among the good seed, where the householder instructs “Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'” The writer, not Anabaptist as far as I know, suggests that this parable is non-violent, which seemed a bit odd at first sight. But I think he means that this parable reminds us that it’s not up to us to judge who or what is a weed and who or what is the good seed of the kingdom of heaven. We need to wait patiently for God to deal with this in due course, so the promise of the ultimate destruction of the evil elements is an encouragement to us not to destroy…
And finally let’s think about Matthew’s context. Writing after the fall of Jerusalem, he and the church he was writing for had already witnessed cataclysmic events right on their doorstep without having to get anywhere near the fire of judgment. And they were experiencing persecution, with the temptation to turn away from the faith for fear of torture or death. Could Matthew be trying to show that it would ultimately be even worse to fall away from the faith that to stick with it and be persecuted?
Well, I do think we can get a sense from each gospel of the pressing questions in the community for which the author wrote. In Matthew’s case one example is his apparent determination to tie up lots of loose ends to help with Christian apologetics in his day. For instance, the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem but Jesus came from Nazareth – so Matthew makes sure we know that he was at least born in Bethlehem. Or there was a rumour that Jesus’ disciples stole his body while the guards were asleep by the tomb – so Matthew tells us this rumour was deliberately concocted by the priests and bolstered by their bribing the soldiers. So I don’t think it is too far-fetched to speculate that, for an audience that might be tempted to give up their faith, Matthew homed in on Jesus’ most “fierce” and fiery language to drive home a message about persevering in spite of persecution.
Well, there is much more to say, but you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m not going to say it. I’ll close with a summary of what has struck me most as I’ve spent a couple of weeks in the company of Matthew’s Jesus. I’ve seen a passionate, fierce and uncompromising man. He’s deeply concerned that his disciples should be truly righteous from the hidden places of their hearts to the action that flows out of their hearts, without attempting to rationalise or weaken that call to righteousness – there’s a challenge there for me and perhaps for others. I’ve been reminded, somewhat to my surprise, how many opportunities Matthew takes to point out that Jesus is special, not any old man of God, a prophet or a son of God, but THE Messiah, THE son of Man and THE Son of God. And I’ve seen Jesus also as surprisingly gentle and tender, encouraging us into a warm relationship with a heavenly Father who cares deeply for us.
Matt 5:17-22, 27-32 & 43-45
17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 21 "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, "You shall not murder'; and "whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, "You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.
27 "You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell. 31 "It was also said, "Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' 32 But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
43 "You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Matt 12:9-21
9 He left that place and entered their synagogue; 10 a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, "Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. 11 He said to them, "Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? 12 How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath." 13 Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other. 14 But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him. 15 When Jesus became aware of this, he departed. Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, 16 and he ordered them not to make him known. 17 This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: 18 "Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. 19 He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. 20 He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory. 21 And in his name the Gentiles will hope."
Matt 19:23-26
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." 25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, "Then who can be saved?" 26 But Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."
Showing posts with label Four gospels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Four gospels. Show all posts
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Mark's Gospel
Preacher: Lesley
This is the second in our series taking an overview of the four gospels. Today I’m going to talk about the gospel of Mark. I didn’t just choose it because it’s the shortest one. I think Mark is a gospel which is particularly important for our times, as we’ll hear later.
I have a book that someone gave me called ’An Idiot’s Guide to the Bible’. It summarises many of the major themes in the books of the Bible. Looking at the section on the gospels, I found very few references from the gospel of Mark. Most of its examples were drawn from Matthew, Luke and John. That tends to be the way that the book of Mark is treated – as a less complex and therefore less valuable version of the gospel. But recently people are finding that Mark has hidden depths.
It’s widely accepted that Mark was the earliest gospel to be written and that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were elaborations on Mark’s version. A few scholars have thought that Matthew’s version came first, but I find it difficult to believe that the author of Mark would then pare down a more complex narrative or that Luke would have started with Matthew’s version, chucked out some stuff and inserted extra details into the description of events. It’s not an exact parallel, but it’s a bit like saying that ‘The Hobbit’ must have been written after ‘The Lord of the Rings’ because the Hobbit is shorter and contains some similar material!
Although the gospel never mentions who wrote it, writings from the early part of the second century name him as John Mark, who appears in Acts and some of the New Testament letters. He was the cousin of Barnabas and he went with Paul on his first missionary journey, but fell out with Paul by going home early. Later Barnabas took him under his wing and forged a reconciliation with Paul. Mark was a good friend and fellow-worker to both Paul and Peter in Rome. Peter’s first epistle describes Mark as Peter’s son. After their deaths it is said that he wrote down the substance of Peter’s preaching, so what we get coming through Mark is the dynamism and energy we can see in the descriptions of Peter in the New Testament. The content and order of Mark’s gospel follows that of Peter’s sermon in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts. So, if Mark wrote his gospel first then the order in Acts is copied from Mark and not the other way round.
We call it plagiarism today and I used to tell my Open University students that it is a deadly sin, but in those days it was perfectly reasonable to base your book on someone else’s. So Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels with the scroll of Mark open in front of them, adding another source the scholar’s call Q and bringing in other material from the oral tradition. Each of them tried to emphasise particular information that they wanted to convey to the particular readers they had in mind.
Mark does this too, of course, and it’s long been recognised that his version emphasises Jesus in action. It leaps straight in with ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ There are no stories about Jesus’ birth. Mark seeks to emphasise that what Jesus did reveals him to be the Christ. It gives us less detail about Jesus teaching, but in general is less triumphalist than the other gospels. It is more critical of the disciples, including Peter, and talks of Jesus’ power being limited on occasions – for instance by people’s lack of faith, in Nazareth.
The additional details of events in Jesus ministry which aren’t necessary for the story show that it could well be the record of a first person account. For instance Mark said that when Jesus called them the disciples James and John left their father in the boat with the hired men, which Matthew and Luke don’t include. One intriguing detail comes in the Mark’s description of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. He writes ”A certain young man was following him wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” Some people believe that this young man was the author himself – or why include him? Acts 12 tells us that the early church met in the house of John Mark’s mother in Jerusalem and it may be that this is where the upper room was in which the last supper was held. I can imagine that young John Mark, having gone to bed while the Passover supper of Jesus and his disciples continued, heard this interesting group leaving, still singing psalms maybe, and decided to follow them wrapped only in a bed-sheet.
Mark is believed to have written his gospel in Rome, though some would see it written in a Palestinian setting, despite the fact that he finds it necessary to explain Jewish customs and words to those of his readers who aren’t Jewish. Most scholars agree that he wrote it about AD 65-70. And this dating is crucial to understanding the atmosphere in which it was written. The Roman historian Tacitus describes the emperor Nero blaming on Christians the fire that swept Rome in AD 64 destroying most of the city. Thereafter he extensively persecuted the Christians.
Tacitus wrote “Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Christian tradition holds that Peter, and probably Paul, were killed in Rome during this persecution. Meanwhile, news was coming back to Rome of what was going on in the Jewish homeland. In 66 AD the first seeds of dissent about Roman authority and taxes, starting as a religious dispute between Jews and Greeks, began to grow into a full-scale rebellion against Roman rule. By 67 AD Nero had sent forces under the future emperor Vespasian and the war culminated in the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple in AD 70. At that time many Christians were Jews or strongly associated with Judaism. So you can imagine the terror of the church in Rome, subject to persecution there and fearing the destruction of the land that was the bedrock of their faith. We can see that Mark’s gospel was probably written in haste in an effort to record what Peter recalled of Jesus before there was no-one left who had known him and, perhaps, because Mark feared that he himself would be next to be killed.
Given this background, the urgency you hear in Mark’s gospel is understandable. Jesus is always doing something ‘ immediately’ He is a powerful decision-maker who cuts through confusion and doubt. On the other hand Jesus, as portrayed by Mark, is no stranger to grief and uncertainty. From the second chapter Jesus hints that there is a time that he will not be with them and throughout the book it becomes increasingly clear that that he expects to suffer and die, though he would rise again. His agony in Gethsemane is not relieved by any support from his disciples nor a comforting angel. His mockery of a trial and torture by the soldiers, his betrayal by a crowd that preferred an outlaw, are all stark and bitter.
Mark’s portrayal of the crucifixion is bleak and not at all triumphant. There is no caring conversation with his mother and favourite disciple, no forgiveness of his torturers or of one of the bandits crucified with him. There is an overwhelming sense of desolation and abandonment by God. And his last great cry is of wordless pain rather than surrendering his spirit to his Father. There is nothing of comfort here. It is raw suffering. Throughout the gospel, Mark shows Jesus as a man like any other (as well as the Son of God) and especially here at his crucifixion, as the forces of evil, pain and death seem completely to overwhelm him.
And perhaps it is here that Jesus comes closest to the readers for whom Mark wrote – facing loss, persecution and huge uncertainty. The crucified and abandoned Christ is near to most of us at some time of our life or another. Perhaps Mark’s gospel is especially relevant to us at this time of economic collapse, growing unemployment and ecological uncertainty, when some people may be feeling that God has abandoned them.
The gospel concludes with Jesus’ resurrection. Unlike the other gospels, though, the oldest manuscripts do not have either the shorter or longer endings which appear to have been added in later manuscripts, drawing from the other Gospels. In fact the original Mark’s Gospel almost certainly ends where our earlier reading finished – with the women too afraid and awestruck to tell anyone what they had seen.
Why should it end there? Where are the resurrection appearances of Jesus which the other Gospels and Paul’s letters, which were written before Mark’s Gospel, describe? It is a mystery. Perhaps the ending of the original manuscript was lost. Maybe Mark had to flee before he had finished it. Whatever the reason, his readers are left with a mystery and empty tomb and a strange message – a cliffhanger like the end of the episode in a TV series. Except that Mark never came back to write the final chapter.
For we who live in a world that has become more uncertain, this mystery may also be a common experience. What is going to happen, am I being led somewhere? Why do I have to suffer the way I do? Where is God in all this? One metaphor for this may be the desert experience that we thought about earlier. We may feel confused, alone, abandoned and in fear and pain. These things happen to all of us to some degree. I’ve been feeling a bit like that myself this weekend.
Up until Friday I thought I was going on a cruise to Iceland and Greenland in 2 weeks time with my sister. Then we found a couple of days ago that all the shore excursions seem to be fully booked. So we’re trying to find out whether that is really the case, whether there’s anything else we can do or whether we have grounds for canceling the trip. It’s all in the air at the moment.
Perhaps Mark deliberately left the end of his gospel up in the air, because he had sent the previous 15 chapters setting out Jesus’ remedy for difficulty, suffering and uncertainty.
In recent decades there has been a realization that despite his less literary Greek and his more direct and abrupt message, Mark has some useful things to offer. Some of you may know of Anabaptist fellow-traveller, Ched Myers. We’ve been lucky enough to have him preach here on the feeding of the 5000. He was talking about God’s economy of abundance set against human management of scarcity. He covers it in his book ‘Binding the Strong Man’, the political reading of Mark’s gospel. He understands Jesus as described by Mark as being in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, standing up against the oppressive and godless political systems of his day, including the corruption of the official religious authorities, in defense of the poor and outcast. Despite his nonviolent resistance to these forces, in the end the powers conspire to destroy him. However, the call to radical discipleship lives on, symbolized by the empty tomb, where his followers today, as well as in the first century, are also challenged to become part of the story as Jesus goes before us to Galilee, the seat of his ministry. We are also called to radical repentance and a new lifestyle which looks towards the coming kingdom of God.
Another person who has written on Mark is the New Zealand theologian, Chris Marshall. He was a member of this church while studying in London and the PhD he then wrote was published as a study of the theme faith in the gospel of Mark.
He points out that faith is one of the key issues in this gospel. It starts with an uncompromising statement that Jesus is the Son of God – with which the reader must disagree or believe. The very first chapter sets out a summary of Jesus’ teaching in Galilee: ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the good news.’ This is a statement of one type of faith which Mark addresses. It is the faith that saves. It is the belief and acceptance of Jesus’ proclamation of the dawning Kingdom of God. The response is a move away from former sinful ways of living and a commitment of trust in Jesus as the bringer of the Kingdom. This is shown in a lifestyle change to that of discipleship. Mark shows what is expected of disciples by the dialogue between Jesus and his chosen Twelve. Often in Mark, Jesus is exasperated by their lack of understanding or faith and in his instruction to them shows us as disciples how we also should believe and live.
The other kind of faith, which can be seen as different but sometimes overlapping the faith of discipleship is the faith of the petitioner. This is illustrated by our reading from Mark 9, in which Jesus, fresh from the mount of transfiguration, where he was revealed to Peter, James and John as the true Son of God, finds that the remaining 9 disciples had been having trouble casting out a demon of epilepsy from a boy who had been brought along by his father. Jesus talks about the importance of faith (and later of prayer) in casting out such demons. Further on he talks about the way that faith as small as a mustard seed will enable the believer to move mountains.
But such faith is often difficult for us. This passage in Mark has a sentence not found in the other gospels. But how often have I found myself, and I’m sure most other followers of Jesus, echoing the words of the father of the epileptic boy: “I believe; help my unbelief.” We want to believe in the power of God and we think we should ask for what God wants in this world, but we’re often paralysed. What if God doesn’t want us to be cured, or to get the job or home or partner that we want? What if God has different plans for me? We want to be able to pray with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, “Not what I want, but what you want.” We know we should pray in line with God’s purposes, but how can we know what these are? Mark gives us some clues. The epileptic boy’s father shows us some of this. First of all, he is acting for another, out of compassion. He asks Jesus’ help for ‘us’ – identifying himself with the boy’s plight. He asks Jesus for help rather tentatively ‘ If you are able…’ Jesus throws this back at him with the comment that all things are possible to the one who believes.’ The father understands this as highlighting his own need for faith and responds with the cry that believers have echoed down the centuries: “I believe, help my unbelief”.
This phrase shows that in Mark, faith is not a once for all possession, but that in every believer there is a tension between faith and disbelief and that we only maintain our faith by God’s grace. Faith, for Mark, only proves itself when tested. And of course one of the places it is most tested is in that experience of the desert, in which we may feel that we are holding onto faith by the slightest thread, or that if Christ did not hold onto us we would fall away.
Secondly it is a situation of total human powerlessness. Despite all his care and love, the father has been unable to help the boy, and nor can Jesus’ disciples. Many of Jesus’ miracles recorded in Mark have a similar context. Not only do people such as the paralysed man brought by 4 friends and let down through the roof, the faithful leper, and the woman with a haemorrhage have great need, they also suffer from social disadvantage. Even Jairus the ruler is helpless in the face of his daughter’s death. There is nothing humanly possible, and those involved need to recognize and accept their powerlessness in the situation.
Beyond this, in Mark’s gospel, those who would follow Christ in faith are called to put themselves in a situation of powerlessness, by renouncing their claim to security, status or control. The rich young man has to give up his wealth; the twelve are to leave everything to follow Jesus, to go off preaching in abject poverty and when they seek to rely on themselves or are terrified by the things like the storm that they cannot control, Jesus says that they are faithless. In this desert place of helpless confusion, fear or suffering, we are not supposed to seek to control the situation through human influence, but to trust in the power of our loving God.
This gospel writer doesn’t give us the explanations that Matthew or Luke do. But he shows that Jesus knows about our failure and unbelief as well as our success. Mark writes for ordinary, fallible followers who are finding themselves in situations of loss and persecution and who need strengthening by the story of the suffering Son of Man, whose suffering is an essential part of the story, but who also calls us to follow his example. The gospel ends, not with Jesus’ abiding presence but with his absence. The tomb is empty, but there is a messenger telling his followers that the Risen Christ is going before them to Galilee. This disturbing ending challenges us also to complete the story, to echo the desperate father ‘I believe; help my unbelief’ and in that faith to follow Jesus wherever he leads, even through the desert.
This is the second in our series taking an overview of the four gospels. Today I’m going to talk about the gospel of Mark. I didn’t just choose it because it’s the shortest one. I think Mark is a gospel which is particularly important for our times, as we’ll hear later.
I have a book that someone gave me called ’An Idiot’s Guide to the Bible’. It summarises many of the major themes in the books of the Bible. Looking at the section on the gospels, I found very few references from the gospel of Mark. Most of its examples were drawn from Matthew, Luke and John. That tends to be the way that the book of Mark is treated – as a less complex and therefore less valuable version of the gospel. But recently people are finding that Mark has hidden depths.
It’s widely accepted that Mark was the earliest gospel to be written and that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were elaborations on Mark’s version. A few scholars have thought that Matthew’s version came first, but I find it difficult to believe that the author of Mark would then pare down a more complex narrative or that Luke would have started with Matthew’s version, chucked out some stuff and inserted extra details into the description of events. It’s not an exact parallel, but it’s a bit like saying that ‘The Hobbit’ must have been written after ‘The Lord of the Rings’ because the Hobbit is shorter and contains some similar material!
Although the gospel never mentions who wrote it, writings from the early part of the second century name him as John Mark, who appears in Acts and some of the New Testament letters. He was the cousin of Barnabas and he went with Paul on his first missionary journey, but fell out with Paul by going home early. Later Barnabas took him under his wing and forged a reconciliation with Paul. Mark was a good friend and fellow-worker to both Paul and Peter in Rome. Peter’s first epistle describes Mark as Peter’s son. After their deaths it is said that he wrote down the substance of Peter’s preaching, so what we get coming through Mark is the dynamism and energy we can see in the descriptions of Peter in the New Testament. The content and order of Mark’s gospel follows that of Peter’s sermon in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts. So, if Mark wrote his gospel first then the order in Acts is copied from Mark and not the other way round.
We call it plagiarism today and I used to tell my Open University students that it is a deadly sin, but in those days it was perfectly reasonable to base your book on someone else’s. So Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels with the scroll of Mark open in front of them, adding another source the scholar’s call Q and bringing in other material from the oral tradition. Each of them tried to emphasise particular information that they wanted to convey to the particular readers they had in mind.
Mark does this too, of course, and it’s long been recognised that his version emphasises Jesus in action. It leaps straight in with ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ There are no stories about Jesus’ birth. Mark seeks to emphasise that what Jesus did reveals him to be the Christ. It gives us less detail about Jesus teaching, but in general is less triumphalist than the other gospels. It is more critical of the disciples, including Peter, and talks of Jesus’ power being limited on occasions – for instance by people’s lack of faith, in Nazareth.
The additional details of events in Jesus ministry which aren’t necessary for the story show that it could well be the record of a first person account. For instance Mark said that when Jesus called them the disciples James and John left their father in the boat with the hired men, which Matthew and Luke don’t include. One intriguing detail comes in the Mark’s description of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. He writes ”A certain young man was following him wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” Some people believe that this young man was the author himself – or why include him? Acts 12 tells us that the early church met in the house of John Mark’s mother in Jerusalem and it may be that this is where the upper room was in which the last supper was held. I can imagine that young John Mark, having gone to bed while the Passover supper of Jesus and his disciples continued, heard this interesting group leaving, still singing psalms maybe, and decided to follow them wrapped only in a bed-sheet.
Mark is believed to have written his gospel in Rome, though some would see it written in a Palestinian setting, despite the fact that he finds it necessary to explain Jewish customs and words to those of his readers who aren’t Jewish. Most scholars agree that he wrote it about AD 65-70. And this dating is crucial to understanding the atmosphere in which it was written. The Roman historian Tacitus describes the emperor Nero blaming on Christians the fire that swept Rome in AD 64 destroying most of the city. Thereafter he extensively persecuted the Christians.
Tacitus wrote “Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Christian tradition holds that Peter, and probably Paul, were killed in Rome during this persecution. Meanwhile, news was coming back to Rome of what was going on in the Jewish homeland. In 66 AD the first seeds of dissent about Roman authority and taxes, starting as a religious dispute between Jews and Greeks, began to grow into a full-scale rebellion against Roman rule. By 67 AD Nero had sent forces under the future emperor Vespasian and the war culminated in the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple in AD 70. At that time many Christians were Jews or strongly associated with Judaism. So you can imagine the terror of the church in Rome, subject to persecution there and fearing the destruction of the land that was the bedrock of their faith. We can see that Mark’s gospel was probably written in haste in an effort to record what Peter recalled of Jesus before there was no-one left who had known him and, perhaps, because Mark feared that he himself would be next to be killed.
Given this background, the urgency you hear in Mark’s gospel is understandable. Jesus is always doing something ‘ immediately’ He is a powerful decision-maker who cuts through confusion and doubt. On the other hand Jesus, as portrayed by Mark, is no stranger to grief and uncertainty. From the second chapter Jesus hints that there is a time that he will not be with them and throughout the book it becomes increasingly clear that that he expects to suffer and die, though he would rise again. His agony in Gethsemane is not relieved by any support from his disciples nor a comforting angel. His mockery of a trial and torture by the soldiers, his betrayal by a crowd that preferred an outlaw, are all stark and bitter.
Mark’s portrayal of the crucifixion is bleak and not at all triumphant. There is no caring conversation with his mother and favourite disciple, no forgiveness of his torturers or of one of the bandits crucified with him. There is an overwhelming sense of desolation and abandonment by God. And his last great cry is of wordless pain rather than surrendering his spirit to his Father. There is nothing of comfort here. It is raw suffering. Throughout the gospel, Mark shows Jesus as a man like any other (as well as the Son of God) and especially here at his crucifixion, as the forces of evil, pain and death seem completely to overwhelm him.
And perhaps it is here that Jesus comes closest to the readers for whom Mark wrote – facing loss, persecution and huge uncertainty. The crucified and abandoned Christ is near to most of us at some time of our life or another. Perhaps Mark’s gospel is especially relevant to us at this time of economic collapse, growing unemployment and ecological uncertainty, when some people may be feeling that God has abandoned them.
The gospel concludes with Jesus’ resurrection. Unlike the other gospels, though, the oldest manuscripts do not have either the shorter or longer endings which appear to have been added in later manuscripts, drawing from the other Gospels. In fact the original Mark’s Gospel almost certainly ends where our earlier reading finished – with the women too afraid and awestruck to tell anyone what they had seen.
Why should it end there? Where are the resurrection appearances of Jesus which the other Gospels and Paul’s letters, which were written before Mark’s Gospel, describe? It is a mystery. Perhaps the ending of the original manuscript was lost. Maybe Mark had to flee before he had finished it. Whatever the reason, his readers are left with a mystery and empty tomb and a strange message – a cliffhanger like the end of the episode in a TV series. Except that Mark never came back to write the final chapter.
For we who live in a world that has become more uncertain, this mystery may also be a common experience. What is going to happen, am I being led somewhere? Why do I have to suffer the way I do? Where is God in all this? One metaphor for this may be the desert experience that we thought about earlier. We may feel confused, alone, abandoned and in fear and pain. These things happen to all of us to some degree. I’ve been feeling a bit like that myself this weekend.
Up until Friday I thought I was going on a cruise to Iceland and Greenland in 2 weeks time with my sister. Then we found a couple of days ago that all the shore excursions seem to be fully booked. So we’re trying to find out whether that is really the case, whether there’s anything else we can do or whether we have grounds for canceling the trip. It’s all in the air at the moment.
Perhaps Mark deliberately left the end of his gospel up in the air, because he had sent the previous 15 chapters setting out Jesus’ remedy for difficulty, suffering and uncertainty.
In recent decades there has been a realization that despite his less literary Greek and his more direct and abrupt message, Mark has some useful things to offer. Some of you may know of Anabaptist fellow-traveller, Ched Myers. We’ve been lucky enough to have him preach here on the feeding of the 5000. He was talking about God’s economy of abundance set against human management of scarcity. He covers it in his book ‘Binding the Strong Man’, the political reading of Mark’s gospel. He understands Jesus as described by Mark as being in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, standing up against the oppressive and godless political systems of his day, including the corruption of the official religious authorities, in defense of the poor and outcast. Despite his nonviolent resistance to these forces, in the end the powers conspire to destroy him. However, the call to radical discipleship lives on, symbolized by the empty tomb, where his followers today, as well as in the first century, are also challenged to become part of the story as Jesus goes before us to Galilee, the seat of his ministry. We are also called to radical repentance and a new lifestyle which looks towards the coming kingdom of God.
Another person who has written on Mark is the New Zealand theologian, Chris Marshall. He was a member of this church while studying in London and the PhD he then wrote was published as a study of the theme faith in the gospel of Mark.
He points out that faith is one of the key issues in this gospel. It starts with an uncompromising statement that Jesus is the Son of God – with which the reader must disagree or believe. The very first chapter sets out a summary of Jesus’ teaching in Galilee: ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the good news.’ This is a statement of one type of faith which Mark addresses. It is the faith that saves. It is the belief and acceptance of Jesus’ proclamation of the dawning Kingdom of God. The response is a move away from former sinful ways of living and a commitment of trust in Jesus as the bringer of the Kingdom. This is shown in a lifestyle change to that of discipleship. Mark shows what is expected of disciples by the dialogue between Jesus and his chosen Twelve. Often in Mark, Jesus is exasperated by their lack of understanding or faith and in his instruction to them shows us as disciples how we also should believe and live.
The other kind of faith, which can be seen as different but sometimes overlapping the faith of discipleship is the faith of the petitioner. This is illustrated by our reading from Mark 9, in which Jesus, fresh from the mount of transfiguration, where he was revealed to Peter, James and John as the true Son of God, finds that the remaining 9 disciples had been having trouble casting out a demon of epilepsy from a boy who had been brought along by his father. Jesus talks about the importance of faith (and later of prayer) in casting out such demons. Further on he talks about the way that faith as small as a mustard seed will enable the believer to move mountains.
But such faith is often difficult for us. This passage in Mark has a sentence not found in the other gospels. But how often have I found myself, and I’m sure most other followers of Jesus, echoing the words of the father of the epileptic boy: “I believe; help my unbelief.” We want to believe in the power of God and we think we should ask for what God wants in this world, but we’re often paralysed. What if God doesn’t want us to be cured, or to get the job or home or partner that we want? What if God has different plans for me? We want to be able to pray with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, “Not what I want, but what you want.” We know we should pray in line with God’s purposes, but how can we know what these are? Mark gives us some clues. The epileptic boy’s father shows us some of this. First of all, he is acting for another, out of compassion. He asks Jesus’ help for ‘us’ – identifying himself with the boy’s plight. He asks Jesus for help rather tentatively ‘ If you are able…’ Jesus throws this back at him with the comment that all things are possible to the one who believes.’ The father understands this as highlighting his own need for faith and responds with the cry that believers have echoed down the centuries: “I believe, help my unbelief”.
This phrase shows that in Mark, faith is not a once for all possession, but that in every believer there is a tension between faith and disbelief and that we only maintain our faith by God’s grace. Faith, for Mark, only proves itself when tested. And of course one of the places it is most tested is in that experience of the desert, in which we may feel that we are holding onto faith by the slightest thread, or that if Christ did not hold onto us we would fall away.
Secondly it is a situation of total human powerlessness. Despite all his care and love, the father has been unable to help the boy, and nor can Jesus’ disciples. Many of Jesus’ miracles recorded in Mark have a similar context. Not only do people such as the paralysed man brought by 4 friends and let down through the roof, the faithful leper, and the woman with a haemorrhage have great need, they also suffer from social disadvantage. Even Jairus the ruler is helpless in the face of his daughter’s death. There is nothing humanly possible, and those involved need to recognize and accept their powerlessness in the situation.
Beyond this, in Mark’s gospel, those who would follow Christ in faith are called to put themselves in a situation of powerlessness, by renouncing their claim to security, status or control. The rich young man has to give up his wealth; the twelve are to leave everything to follow Jesus, to go off preaching in abject poverty and when they seek to rely on themselves or are terrified by the things like the storm that they cannot control, Jesus says that they are faithless. In this desert place of helpless confusion, fear or suffering, we are not supposed to seek to control the situation through human influence, but to trust in the power of our loving God.
This gospel writer doesn’t give us the explanations that Matthew or Luke do. But he shows that Jesus knows about our failure and unbelief as well as our success. Mark writes for ordinary, fallible followers who are finding themselves in situations of loss and persecution and who need strengthening by the story of the suffering Son of Man, whose suffering is an essential part of the story, but who also calls us to follow his example. The gospel ends, not with Jesus’ abiding presence but with his absence. The tomb is empty, but there is a messenger telling his followers that the Risen Christ is going before them to Galilee. This disturbing ending challenges us also to complete the story, to echo the desperate father ‘I believe; help my unbelief’ and in that faith to follow Jesus wherever he leads, even through the desert.
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Jesus in the Gospel of Luke
Preacher: Veronica
When Sue told me we were doing a series of sermons on Jesus in the four Gospels I immediately said, ‘Oh, I bagsy Luke’. It’s not only my favourite Gospel but has one of my all time favourite passages in all Scripture, the healing of the woman bent double which you’ve just heard.
What I hadn’t realized until I started reading up for the sermon, was that Luke is not only the longest of the four Gospels, but taken together with his sequel, the book of Acts, Luke is the most prolific writer in the New Testament - he wrote even more than Paul. And I also hadn’t realized what a tough task it is to preach on a whole Gospel rather than just one or two selected passages. What I’m going to offer, then, is no more than an overview. I do recommend you read right through Luke, which will only take you a couple of hours - but then I expect the three other preachers will also exhort you to read through Matthew, Mark and John, so please forgive me for that.
I want to keep the details of date, authorship etc brief cos that’s the boring bit. We know very little about who Luke was, although we do know he was a missionary companion of Paul (there are passages in Acts where he turns to the pronoun ‘we’ rather than ‘they’ which suggests he was there at the events described). There is strong Scriptural and external evidence, and tradition, that he was a Gentile - as far as we know the only Gentile to write Scripture - and that he was a doctor. His Gentile origin shows in the high standard of his Greek, although his writing also has many echoes of Jesus’ language, Aramaic, and of Hebrew. As for the date of the Gospel, it could be anywhere between the early 60s AD and the early 2nd century. You pays your liberal or conservative commentator and you makes your choice.
What is much more generally agreed is the driving purpose of Luke’s writing. One commentary I looked at was entitled ‘Luke: Historian and Theologian’. That pretty much sums up the general opinion. While he sets out his credentials as a historian in the preface which we heard, he is clearly writing history for a theological purpose. Some have classified his Gospel as ‘Heilsgeschichte’ or ‘salvation history’ - and I included that just so I could say ‘Heilsgeschichte’ which is a lovely word. But his interest is not just in the history of salvation, but in the character of salvation and its inclusive scope. In fact he is the only Gospel writer to use the word ‘salvation’ at all, and he has more instances of ‘save’ and ‘saviour’ than the others as well.
Of course the label of ‘salvation history’ could also be used, in different ways, of the other Gospels, with the relationship of theology and history varying. So what else is special about Luke?
In preparation for preaching today I re-read the whole Gospel, using one of those Bibles that has references at the head of each passage, showing where there are parallels to this story or teaching in the other Gospels - especially of course the other synoptic Gospels Mark and Matthew. And I was amazed at the number of passages in Luke that didn’t have any cross references at all, because the story was exclusive to Luke. In fact I developed a new TLA for my notes: ETL, standing for ‘Exclusive to Luke’.
Here’s a relatively short list of what we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have Luke’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry. We wouldn’t have several well loved parts of the Christmas story for a start: this includes the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist, Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and her challenging poem the Magnificat which I think makes her the first New Testament prophet, the song of Zechariah, the angelic visit to the shepherds, the story of Simeon and Anna at the Temple, Simeon’s prayer which we call the Nunc Dimittis, and finally the childhood story of the boy Jesus cutting loose from his parents at the Temple and going to debate with the scribes and teachers.
That’s only the beginning. Without Luke we wouldn’t have Jesus’ manifesto from Isaiah 61 at the Nazareth synagogue. We wouldn’t know the names of prominent women who followed Jesus and financed him - in fact we wouldn’t know that they did. We wouldn’t have the parable of the Good Samaritan. We wouldn’t have the story of Mary and Martha’s dispute over the household jobs. We wouldn’t have the parable of the rich fool who planned bigger barns to store his wealth, but then died that night. We wouldn’t have the disciples questioning Jesus about the unmerited suffering of the Galileans Pilate killed, and his enigmatic answer. We wouldn’t have the healing of the ten lepers, of whom only one - a despised Samaritan -
returned to thank Jesus.
Nor would we have the parable of the shrewd manager, difficult and obscure as it is. I have my own interpretation which sees it as about God cancelling our debts to him, but I don’t have time to go into that here. Without Luke we wouldn’t have the parables of the rich man and Lazarus, the lost coin, the woman baking bread, the widow and the unrighteous judge, the Pharisee and the publican, and crucially the Prodigal Son. We wouldn’t have the story of Zacchaeus, which makes this the Gospel for short people. We would not have Jesus telling his hearers to take the lowest place at a dinner, or Jesus weeping over Jerusalem.
Nor would we know that Jesus was sent to be tried before Herod as well as the Sanhedrin and Pilate. We wouldn’t have Jesus on the cross saying ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’; or his saying to the repentant thief next to him, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. And we wouldn’t have the full story of the walk to Emmaus, which if nothing else has given us the hymn ‘Abide with me’, and that would be a great loss to football and rugby fans.
In fact the amount of unique material in Luke is so great that I could use the whole sermon to list it and analyse it. Instead I just want to list a few of the major emphases in Luke, which are all clearly shown in the material that’s unique to him.
I’ve already mentioned the emphasis on salvation, which is a more explicit theme in Luke than in the others. Luke is clearly at pains to convey that this salvation is not for a chosen few. The invitation is to all. From the very beginning Luke is interested in Jesus’ interaction with all sorts of people. His birth is announced to lowly shepherds, and his genealogy goes not like Matthew’s version back to Abraham, father of the Jews, but to Adam, father of everyone - and from ‘son of Adam’ to ‘son of God’. In Luke’s account of John the Baptist’s work, Luke shows him giving socially and economically radical commands to those who follow him. And he also includes the end of the ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ prophecy about John, which reads ‘and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’, which is missed out in the other Gospels.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry in Luke we see him interacting with social outcasts of all kinds, from the lepers to the hated tax collector. Luke’s Jesus is a friend of the poor - indeed in the Beatitudes he blesses not the poor in spirit or those who hunger for righteousness but simply the poor and the hungry. Also only in Luke are these blessings followed by a series of ‘Woe’s to the rich and well fed - so Luke acknowledges that good news to the poor has inevitably to include some bad news for the rich.
Luke ‘s Jesus is also very much a friend of women, often in socially unconventional ways. He has a number of women’s stories not found elsewhere, including my favourite which I’ll come to in a moment. There is also a large number of occasions where when Luke tells a story or parable about a man, he immediately balances it with one about a woman. For instance, in the birth stories, he tells us about Anna as well as Simeon’. With the parable of the mustard seed he includes the parable of the woman baking bread, while the lost sheep is followed by the lost coin - both of these examples of a woman standing for God in a parable. In Luke, when Jesus says that he will give no sign except the sign of Jonah, he immediately starts to talk not just about Jonah’s mission to Gentiles, but about the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. It’s a great exercise to go through Luke looking for these man/woman parallels, and I’m grateful to Trisha Dale for first pointing it out to me.
It’s only Luke who records the conflict between Martha and Mary, in which Jesus commends Mary for sitting at his feet, in the position of a disciple or student, rather than worrying like Martha about the domestic stuff In my favourite, the Luke 13 story of the woman bent double, Jesus uses a unique phrase not found anywhere else in the NT - he calls her a ‘daughter of Abraham’. And that healing has always seemed to me to be a kind of symbolic raising up of women from a lower status, into being able to stand alongside men on an equal basis. I used to do a workshop on it where I read the passage and a poem I had written on it, while all the hearers stood in a circle with all the men bent double and all the women standing straight - which I won’t inflict on you today but which provoked some really interesting discussion. Luke also tells us another of my favourites, the anointing of Jesus’ feet by a sinful woman in Luke 7, which I’ve also written a poem about.
As well as the inclusiveness of Jesus’ call, Luke has a strong emphasis on the centrality of forgiveness. As we’ve seen already, he has several parables about forgiveness which others don’t record. And at the end of his version of the Sermon
on the Mount, instead of Matthew’s rather scary version: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’, Luke has ‘Be merciful as your Father is merciful.’
Such radical openness and mercy, in Luke’s vision, can only be achieved by the infilling of the Holy Spirit. At the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Luke tells us that he returned from the desert ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’. This filling is not only the basis of Jesus’ ministry but it is available to us too as we follow him. As well as sending out the Twelve to teach and heal on his behalf, in Jesus later sends out the seventy, and this has a strong overtone of a mission to the Gentile nations as well as the Jews. And indeed Simeon has prophesied exactly this at the beginning, calling the baby Jesus ‘a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel’.
Luke’s Jesus also exhibits and calls us to a radical humility. He twice quotes Jesus’ saying, ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted’. Only in Luke does Jesus’ say, in response to the dispute about who is greatest: ‘I am among you as one who serves’ , a saying which always reminds me of these words inlaid in the floor of the Chapel of Industry at Coventry Cathedral.
Jesus in Luke then, is the one who calls all, men and women, high and lowly, rich and poor - not only to be healed and cleansed by him but to follow him. He is the one who forgives lavishly. He acts in the power of the Spirit which brings healing to the sick and the oppressed and good news to the poor. One commentator says, ‘Whereas in Matthew the keynote may be said to be royalty, and in Mark power, in Luke it is love’ .
But Luke’s Jesus is not just a sort of hippy dropout preaching peace and love in a 60s sort of way - not that I have anything against hippies, I was one myself. With sayings like the ‘Woes’, his message is a challenging and sometimes frightening one. His view of salvation has scary economic consequences, as we see in his response to Zacchaeus promise to give back his ill-gotten gains: ‘Today salvation has come to this house’. In fact ‘Today’ and ‘now’ are words much more frequent in Luke than in other Gospels: he wants to proclaim that God’s salvation in Christ is for now, not for some distant heavenly realm in the future.
You can probably see now why Luke is my favourite Gospel. It’s a great Gospel for a feminist, as well as a short person; and I think with its challenge to fight social inequality, it’s probably a great Gospel for Anabaptists too.
When Sue told me we were doing a series of sermons on Jesus in the four Gospels I immediately said, ‘Oh, I bagsy Luke’. It’s not only my favourite Gospel but has one of my all time favourite passages in all Scripture, the healing of the woman bent double which you’ve just heard.
What I hadn’t realized until I started reading up for the sermon, was that Luke is not only the longest of the four Gospels, but taken together with his sequel, the book of Acts, Luke is the most prolific writer in the New Testament - he wrote even more than Paul. And I also hadn’t realized what a tough task it is to preach on a whole Gospel rather than just one or two selected passages. What I’m going to offer, then, is no more than an overview. I do recommend you read right through Luke, which will only take you a couple of hours - but then I expect the three other preachers will also exhort you to read through Matthew, Mark and John, so please forgive me for that.
I want to keep the details of date, authorship etc brief cos that’s the boring bit. We know very little about who Luke was, although we do know he was a missionary companion of Paul (there are passages in Acts where he turns to the pronoun ‘we’ rather than ‘they’ which suggests he was there at the events described). There is strong Scriptural and external evidence, and tradition, that he was a Gentile - as far as we know the only Gentile to write Scripture - and that he was a doctor. His Gentile origin shows in the high standard of his Greek, although his writing also has many echoes of Jesus’ language, Aramaic, and of Hebrew. As for the date of the Gospel, it could be anywhere between the early 60s AD and the early 2nd century. You pays your liberal or conservative commentator and you makes your choice.
What is much more generally agreed is the driving purpose of Luke’s writing. One commentary I looked at was entitled ‘Luke: Historian and Theologian’. That pretty much sums up the general opinion. While he sets out his credentials as a historian in the preface which we heard, he is clearly writing history for a theological purpose. Some have classified his Gospel as ‘Heilsgeschichte’ or ‘salvation history’ - and I included that just so I could say ‘Heilsgeschichte’ which is a lovely word. But his interest is not just in the history of salvation, but in the character of salvation and its inclusive scope. In fact he is the only Gospel writer to use the word ‘salvation’ at all, and he has more instances of ‘save’ and ‘saviour’ than the others as well.
Of course the label of ‘salvation history’ could also be used, in different ways, of the other Gospels, with the relationship of theology and history varying. So what else is special about Luke?
In preparation for preaching today I re-read the whole Gospel, using one of those Bibles that has references at the head of each passage, showing where there are parallels to this story or teaching in the other Gospels - especially of course the other synoptic Gospels Mark and Matthew. And I was amazed at the number of passages in Luke that didn’t have any cross references at all, because the story was exclusive to Luke. In fact I developed a new TLA for my notes: ETL, standing for ‘Exclusive to Luke’.
Here’s a relatively short list of what we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have Luke’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry. We wouldn’t have several well loved parts of the Christmas story for a start: this includes the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist, Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and her challenging poem the Magnificat which I think makes her the first New Testament prophet, the song of Zechariah, the angelic visit to the shepherds, the story of Simeon and Anna at the Temple, Simeon’s prayer which we call the Nunc Dimittis, and finally the childhood story of the boy Jesus cutting loose from his parents at the Temple and going to debate with the scribes and teachers.
That’s only the beginning. Without Luke we wouldn’t have Jesus’ manifesto from Isaiah 61 at the Nazareth synagogue. We wouldn’t know the names of prominent women who followed Jesus and financed him - in fact we wouldn’t know that they did. We wouldn’t have the parable of the Good Samaritan. We wouldn’t have the story of Mary and Martha’s dispute over the household jobs. We wouldn’t have the parable of the rich fool who planned bigger barns to store his wealth, but then died that night. We wouldn’t have the disciples questioning Jesus about the unmerited suffering of the Galileans Pilate killed, and his enigmatic answer. We wouldn’t have the healing of the ten lepers, of whom only one - a despised Samaritan -
returned to thank Jesus.
Nor would we have the parable of the shrewd manager, difficult and obscure as it is. I have my own interpretation which sees it as about God cancelling our debts to him, but I don’t have time to go into that here. Without Luke we wouldn’t have the parables of the rich man and Lazarus, the lost coin, the woman baking bread, the widow and the unrighteous judge, the Pharisee and the publican, and crucially the Prodigal Son. We wouldn’t have the story of Zacchaeus, which makes this the Gospel for short people. We would not have Jesus telling his hearers to take the lowest place at a dinner, or Jesus weeping over Jerusalem.
Nor would we know that Jesus was sent to be tried before Herod as well as the Sanhedrin and Pilate. We wouldn’t have Jesus on the cross saying ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’; or his saying to the repentant thief next to him, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. And we wouldn’t have the full story of the walk to Emmaus, which if nothing else has given us the hymn ‘Abide with me’, and that would be a great loss to football and rugby fans.
In fact the amount of unique material in Luke is so great that I could use the whole sermon to list it and analyse it. Instead I just want to list a few of the major emphases in Luke, which are all clearly shown in the material that’s unique to him.
I’ve already mentioned the emphasis on salvation, which is a more explicit theme in Luke than in the others. Luke is clearly at pains to convey that this salvation is not for a chosen few. The invitation is to all. From the very beginning Luke is interested in Jesus’ interaction with all sorts of people. His birth is announced to lowly shepherds, and his genealogy goes not like Matthew’s version back to Abraham, father of the Jews, but to Adam, father of everyone - and from ‘son of Adam’ to ‘son of God’. In Luke’s account of John the Baptist’s work, Luke shows him giving socially and economically radical commands to those who follow him. And he also includes the end of the ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ prophecy about John, which reads ‘and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’, which is missed out in the other Gospels.
Throughout Jesus’ ministry in Luke we see him interacting with social outcasts of all kinds, from the lepers to the hated tax collector. Luke’s Jesus is a friend of the poor - indeed in the Beatitudes he blesses not the poor in spirit or those who hunger for righteousness but simply the poor and the hungry. Also only in Luke are these blessings followed by a series of ‘Woe’s to the rich and well fed - so Luke acknowledges that good news to the poor has inevitably to include some bad news for the rich.
Luke ‘s Jesus is also very much a friend of women, often in socially unconventional ways. He has a number of women’s stories not found elsewhere, including my favourite which I’ll come to in a moment. There is also a large number of occasions where when Luke tells a story or parable about a man, he immediately balances it with one about a woman. For instance, in the birth stories, he tells us about Anna as well as Simeon’. With the parable of the mustard seed he includes the parable of the woman baking bread, while the lost sheep is followed by the lost coin - both of these examples of a woman standing for God in a parable. In Luke, when Jesus says that he will give no sign except the sign of Jonah, he immediately starts to talk not just about Jonah’s mission to Gentiles, but about the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. It’s a great exercise to go through Luke looking for these man/woman parallels, and I’m grateful to Trisha Dale for first pointing it out to me.
It’s only Luke who records the conflict between Martha and Mary, in which Jesus commends Mary for sitting at his feet, in the position of a disciple or student, rather than worrying like Martha about the domestic stuff In my favourite, the Luke 13 story of the woman bent double, Jesus uses a unique phrase not found anywhere else in the NT - he calls her a ‘daughter of Abraham’. And that healing has always seemed to me to be a kind of symbolic raising up of women from a lower status, into being able to stand alongside men on an equal basis. I used to do a workshop on it where I read the passage and a poem I had written on it, while all the hearers stood in a circle with all the men bent double and all the women standing straight - which I won’t inflict on you today but which provoked some really interesting discussion. Luke also tells us another of my favourites, the anointing of Jesus’ feet by a sinful woman in Luke 7, which I’ve also written a poem about.
As well as the inclusiveness of Jesus’ call, Luke has a strong emphasis on the centrality of forgiveness. As we’ve seen already, he has several parables about forgiveness which others don’t record. And at the end of his version of the Sermon
on the Mount, instead of Matthew’s rather scary version: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’, Luke has ‘Be merciful as your Father is merciful.’
Such radical openness and mercy, in Luke’s vision, can only be achieved by the infilling of the Holy Spirit. At the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Luke tells us that he returned from the desert ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’. This filling is not only the basis of Jesus’ ministry but it is available to us too as we follow him. As well as sending out the Twelve to teach and heal on his behalf, in Jesus later sends out the seventy, and this has a strong overtone of a mission to the Gentile nations as well as the Jews. And indeed Simeon has prophesied exactly this at the beginning, calling the baby Jesus ‘a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel’.
Luke’s Jesus also exhibits and calls us to a radical humility. He twice quotes Jesus’ saying, ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted’. Only in Luke does Jesus’ say, in response to the dispute about who is greatest: ‘I am among you as one who serves’ , a saying which always reminds me of these words inlaid in the floor of the Chapel of Industry at Coventry Cathedral.
Jesus in Luke then, is the one who calls all, men and women, high and lowly, rich and poor - not only to be healed and cleansed by him but to follow him. He is the one who forgives lavishly. He acts in the power of the Spirit which brings healing to the sick and the oppressed and good news to the poor. One commentator says, ‘Whereas in Matthew the keynote may be said to be royalty, and in Mark power, in Luke it is love’ .
But Luke’s Jesus is not just a sort of hippy dropout preaching peace and love in a 60s sort of way - not that I have anything against hippies, I was one myself. With sayings like the ‘Woes’, his message is a challenging and sometimes frightening one. His view of salvation has scary economic consequences, as we see in his response to Zacchaeus promise to give back his ill-gotten gains: ‘Today salvation has come to this house’. In fact ‘Today’ and ‘now’ are words much more frequent in Luke than in other Gospels: he wants to proclaim that God’s salvation in Christ is for now, not for some distant heavenly realm in the future.
You can probably see now why Luke is my favourite Gospel. It’s a great Gospel for a feminist, as well as a short person; and I think with its challenge to fight social inequality, it’s probably a great Gospel for Anabaptists too.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
The One Certain Thing
Preacher: Emily
Our sermon series this summer focuses on the four gospels and I believe we are having a speaker each week who will focus on each of the gospels individually. This afternoon, I am going to frame our thinking about the gospels by presenting an overview of some of the common themes and values that run between them.
As many of you know, I am a PhD student in the study of religions at SOAS the school of Oriental and African studies in London. At the moment, I am one of the only people studying Christianity in a department with a heavy focus on Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. In theory, this is a wonderful opportunity for me to learn lots about many elements of different traditions.
In practice, this means that I am often trapped for many hours in small rooms with people explaining the minutia of the Yupdipthika, the classical salafiyya tradition in Egypt or the important contribution of Ibn Arabi in defining the ubermensch tradition. While I am sure that one day this will cause me to dominate a pub quiz if the topic is small esoteric aspects of eastern traditions, it actually means that I have alot of time on my hands to sit and think about how my faith tradition, Christianity, and my denomination, Anabaptism, and my research is very very different.
One person in my program searches for appearances of a character named Kapila in hundreds of Hindu texts. Unfortunately for him, Kapila is one character among thousands and sometimes appears as a demon, sometimes as a cow and sometimes as a human teacher. (I can see the looks on your faces beginning to resemble mine in the midst of these lengthy Kapila lectures so let me just say this - )
The fact that we have a tradition in which the same basic story of the one person – Jesus – is told from four perspectives, is a very useful and interesting contribution of the Christian faith. The story is part of our continuity – the bridge between how it all began and who we are now. Our sacred stories remind us of how it began and what that means for who we are now.
As you are undoubtedly aware, we have four canonical gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but these were not the only gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. They are just the final four that made the cut in the 4th century. In the apocrypha we have other accounts: Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Hebrews and others.
Beyond these, we have a tradition which is rich with other popular retellings. We have thousands of icons, paintings and sculpture in a variety of artistic mediums. We have literature ranging from The Last Temptation of Christ to Christopher Moore’s book Lamb: the gospel according to biff christ’s childhood friend. In movies we have The Passion of the Christ, Life of Brian, Jesus of Montreal among others. We have Clarence Jordan’s bluegrass Cotton Patch Gospels. We have Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell on stage.
As an amateur etymologist or simply word nerd – I find the word Gospel interesting as it points us back to the centrality of the story. Gospel comes from the words “god spell” or “good spell” – an English translation of the Greek euangelion. Good news. The story about god which casts a spell over us, which unites us and, at times divides us.....this is at the heart of our tradition. Some stories are so important, so powerful that we continue to retell them – to ourselves and to others. It is the Gospels that play this role in our faith.
As Mennonites, we believe that the story of what happens to us as a community is also important. We believe that what happens out there in the world, the way our stories intersect with other people’s stories is as important as our sacred story – so we take time each week to share stories, to create community, in our home groups and in church each Sunday. We don’t just rely on one of us – this is the strength of the Anabaptist tradition, we are a community of lay leaders. People from other traditions sometimes ask me, how it is that we trust people who aren’t the leader to tell the story each week and I think that the answer is that we trust multiple viewpoints of the same story. We believe that the story builds the bridge between the individual and the community, between the tradition and the present. We bear witness to the work of the Holy Spirit on earth by gathering each week to retell both our ancient story and the stories of our own lives.
Today, in the far off land of Wooster, Ohio in the United States, my ten year college reunion is taking place. I am not there obviously but this landmark anniversary has been the cause of much rumination for me lately. It’s ok that I am not there – the important thing about reunions is the chance to retell the story – the story of who we are and how we got that way. Sometimes it’s easier to tell it when you can smell the same cut grass, hear the same library chimes that help cast the spell of who we all were ten years ago. But sometimes it’s just the retelling of the story that carries us through.
So, as Mateo and I drove down the Eastern coast of the US last week, we dropped in for a visit on a variety of friends from my college days. Seeing dear friends again was a great joy and as we bask in one another’s presence, our conversation took a familiar path.....we told and retold many of the key stories in our history together. My friend Morgan and I sat on her porch in North Carolina and retold the story of the night we had spent outside in Palestine watching Israeli rockets overhead and pondering whether our optimism and pacifism would see us through the night. As Mateo and I attempted to calm her two hysterically crying twins, my friend Amal and I retold the story of the torturous joint book project where we met. The contexts of my friendships with these two women have changed but the joint story of our friendship has not. And so, as we attempt to catch one another up on the years that have come between, we keep returning to some of the same themes – the stories of how we met, the setting, the times that tested us, defined us. The stories are the measure of our friendship. We become connected when we tell and receive the stories of one another’s lives. We co-create common stories with our friends through shared life with them.
This is also the function of the four gospels. Our most sacred text is about co-creating a tradition by telling a story. Remembering the beginnings and the endings, marking the miracles, preserving the details. In telling the story we re-create our community. When we hear and retell the stories of the life of Jesus, we act as participants in a larger story that includes us too.
Setting
As Chris has very artfully demonstrated in pulling together a theme for today’s service – the setting of the story matters. Our Gospel writers were almost certainly based in different contexts with Matthew writing for a predominately Jewish audience, Mark writing for Romans, Luke for Greeks and John for Gentile Christians. And the settings between the four Gospel accounts do not always match – some have Jesus appearing after resurrection in Emmaus, others in Jerusalem. There seems to be a dispute as to the location of the Last Supper as where the bulk of Jesus’ ministry took place. But the four accounts do take place in concrete geographical space and the singular story takes this sense of place into account.
While the power of the psalms often recall more generic space – our psalm this afternoon recounted mountains, rivers and seas; the gospel accounts are typically quite specific. Our reading from Luke specifically locates the action in Jerusalem and the Mark passage notes both Jerusalem and Bethany. These details help to ground our experience of the story.
Each Sunday afternoon we gather in this space, this point defined by particular sounds, smells and, I would hasten to add, particular (cold) temperature. This locality is also part of who we are – our joint story specifically recalls this place. This space in this community and our LMC in Highgate are interwoven in the story of who this community is. In our liturgical intercession this morning, we concentrated on the context of our urban environment – recalling the spaces of community, the spaces of suffering and praying together for the wholeness and healing of this particular context. This too is part of the story of who we are as a congregation.
Our story as Christians and our story as a congregation is rooted in both an ancient story and a contemporary story – we are suspended between these two narratives, trying to live lives that are compatible with each.
Points of View
Many biblical scholars have made much of the significant differences between the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke and the Gospel of John. Again with the background on words – the word synoptic literally means “seeing with the same eye” and refers to the fact that the gospel accounts of the Matthew, Mark and Luke seem to have much more in common than the account of John.
Depending on your particular upbringing, political orientation, literary preferences, you probably have your own favourite gospel. Some of the accounts focus more on parables, others take a more expository slant. Some emphasize the humanity of Jesus while others seem to concentrate more on his divinity.
Styles aside, the gospels cannot seem to agree on several points of data regarding Jesus....He performed either 29,23 or 10 miracles. He retold either 31,13, 37 or 3 parables. It is unclear exactly who carried the cross and who was there to witness the empty tomb. We are not sure exactly how involved Jesus was with exorcism or with interacting with scribes – accounts vary dramatically.
And all of this is really ok I think. Even the stories with which we are most intimate and familiar look different from different contexts and different storytellers. I think that a few of you may have been around to hear Mateo and I recount the story of how we met – a story which is consistent only in the most obvious of ways. We agree on who the central characters are and we agree that we met in a Spanish language class. Beyond that, there is discrepancy. We have not yet agreed on the canonized version of our story. And since Mateo is not with us this morning to guarantee that you hear his side of the story, I will just tell you this – in one account, the character of Mateo offers, with unrelenting enthusiasm, countless invitations to go on dates – all of which are soundly refused by the character of Emily who feels both burdened and secretly thrilled by the flirtation of this British stranger. In the other account, the character of Mateo helpfully and professionally points out a number of venues and public events which would be of mutual interest to both parties given their common interest in international public policy. Purely professional.
Two accounts – one story.
And more recently we have had to acknowledge a few other voices. On our most recent trip back to the States, we were attending the wedding of our friend Jenny. Jenny was actually in the class where we met – the only person that had a front row seat to our courtship back when we were (mateo) and (Emily) not (mateoandemily). Hearing Jenny’s account of our meeting story is therefore very intriguing to us. When I recently asked her what she remembered – she dramatically rolled her eyes and commented on how INCREDIBLY irritating we both were. “Mateo was constantly flirting with Emily” (I like this detail as it affirms my account of the story) but she continues “and Emily was pretending to need help in Spanish so she could keep leaning over and asking Mateo questions” (not my version of events). But Jenny, looking radiant in her wedding dress, brightens up and says “who would have guessed you would be married and here for my wedding? The whole story is just so unexpected!”
Indeed. And hearing Jenny’s account of the events enriches our own story. This is the value of the communal storytelling project.
The New Testament is a grand communal storytelling project – attempting to retell one of the most riveting and pivotal events in history. In a sense, the Christian story is a written account of the early community telling itself the story of itself. For there to be discrepancies in details is not an inconvenience, it is a richness, adding texture to the events. The Gospel of Matthew is the “thinking gospel” and concentrates on law, logic, order. The story of Jesus is the story of fulfilment of Jewish prophecy. The Gospel of Mark is the gospel of grace – the disciples are portrayed as hopeless, fumbling idiots and it empowers us by helping us to believe that if the disciples manage to be good followers of Jesus, so can we. The story of Jesus in Mark is the story of a person of action, Jesus acts in history and the disciples try to make sense of what it all means. The Gospel of Luke is the solidarity story – the place in which the most stories of solidarity with the poor occur. Jesus in this account is a philosopher and a teacher, an engaged activist on the side of the oppressed. And finally, the Gospel of John is the mystic story with high Christology and Jesus is the divine incarnation, the embodiment of God on earth.
This week, as a church community, we expect to hear news that will significantly shape our story. We are bracing ourselves for a twist in the plot; we are aware that there may be a possible change in the setting in our future. Regardless of what we hear, I believe it will be ever more important for us to keep telling each other the story – the story of who we are, the story of what we believe. And I know, we are up to the task.
Something I like about this congregation is that you appreciate a good story – and we have such rich story tellers amongst us – we have writers, and bloggers, we have film reviewers and theatre reviewers, we have people who sell books, we have actors. We are people who tell stories, people who can appreciate the power of a well told story.
I want to leave you with a poem called The One Certain Thing by Peter Cooley, poet from New Orleans, writing about the importance of language, words and stories. The poem is addressed to his children and is his attempt to explain how words preserve moments and people in time. When I first read it, I was struck by how this poem might also be applied to what might have gone through the thoughts of the gospel writers as they penned the words that became our canon. So when you hear it, I want you to ponder both of those directions.
The One Certain Thing
A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.
I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now—
this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here,
alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.
Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?
You are the person come to clean my room;
you are whichever of my three children
opens the drawer here where this poem will go
in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.
These are the words from immortality.
No one stands between us now except Death:
I enter it entirely writing this.
I have to tell you I am not alone.
Watching you read, Eternity’s with me.
We like to watch you read. Read us again.
Our sermon series this summer focuses on the four gospels and I believe we are having a speaker each week who will focus on each of the gospels individually. This afternoon, I am going to frame our thinking about the gospels by presenting an overview of some of the common themes and values that run between them.
As many of you know, I am a PhD student in the study of religions at SOAS the school of Oriental and African studies in London. At the moment, I am one of the only people studying Christianity in a department with a heavy focus on Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. In theory, this is a wonderful opportunity for me to learn lots about many elements of different traditions.
In practice, this means that I am often trapped for many hours in small rooms with people explaining the minutia of the Yupdipthika, the classical salafiyya tradition in Egypt or the important contribution of Ibn Arabi in defining the ubermensch tradition. While I am sure that one day this will cause me to dominate a pub quiz if the topic is small esoteric aspects of eastern traditions, it actually means that I have alot of time on my hands to sit and think about how my faith tradition, Christianity, and my denomination, Anabaptism, and my research is very very different.
One person in my program searches for appearances of a character named Kapila in hundreds of Hindu texts. Unfortunately for him, Kapila is one character among thousands and sometimes appears as a demon, sometimes as a cow and sometimes as a human teacher. (I can see the looks on your faces beginning to resemble mine in the midst of these lengthy Kapila lectures so let me just say this - )
The fact that we have a tradition in which the same basic story of the one person – Jesus – is told from four perspectives, is a very useful and interesting contribution of the Christian faith. The story is part of our continuity – the bridge between how it all began and who we are now. Our sacred stories remind us of how it began and what that means for who we are now.
As you are undoubtedly aware, we have four canonical gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but these were not the only gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. They are just the final four that made the cut in the 4th century. In the apocrypha we have other accounts: Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Hebrews and others.
Beyond these, we have a tradition which is rich with other popular retellings. We have thousands of icons, paintings and sculpture in a variety of artistic mediums. We have literature ranging from The Last Temptation of Christ to Christopher Moore’s book Lamb: the gospel according to biff christ’s childhood friend. In movies we have The Passion of the Christ, Life of Brian, Jesus of Montreal among others. We have Clarence Jordan’s bluegrass Cotton Patch Gospels. We have Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell on stage.
As an amateur etymologist or simply word nerd – I find the word Gospel interesting as it points us back to the centrality of the story. Gospel comes from the words “god spell” or “good spell” – an English translation of the Greek euangelion. Good news. The story about god which casts a spell over us, which unites us and, at times divides us.....this is at the heart of our tradition. Some stories are so important, so powerful that we continue to retell them – to ourselves and to others. It is the Gospels that play this role in our faith.
As Mennonites, we believe that the story of what happens to us as a community is also important. We believe that what happens out there in the world, the way our stories intersect with other people’s stories is as important as our sacred story – so we take time each week to share stories, to create community, in our home groups and in church each Sunday. We don’t just rely on one of us – this is the strength of the Anabaptist tradition, we are a community of lay leaders. People from other traditions sometimes ask me, how it is that we trust people who aren’t the leader to tell the story each week and I think that the answer is that we trust multiple viewpoints of the same story. We believe that the story builds the bridge between the individual and the community, between the tradition and the present. We bear witness to the work of the Holy Spirit on earth by gathering each week to retell both our ancient story and the stories of our own lives.
Today, in the far off land of Wooster, Ohio in the United States, my ten year college reunion is taking place. I am not there obviously but this landmark anniversary has been the cause of much rumination for me lately. It’s ok that I am not there – the important thing about reunions is the chance to retell the story – the story of who we are and how we got that way. Sometimes it’s easier to tell it when you can smell the same cut grass, hear the same library chimes that help cast the spell of who we all were ten years ago. But sometimes it’s just the retelling of the story that carries us through.
So, as Mateo and I drove down the Eastern coast of the US last week, we dropped in for a visit on a variety of friends from my college days. Seeing dear friends again was a great joy and as we bask in one another’s presence, our conversation took a familiar path.....we told and retold many of the key stories in our history together. My friend Morgan and I sat on her porch in North Carolina and retold the story of the night we had spent outside in Palestine watching Israeli rockets overhead and pondering whether our optimism and pacifism would see us through the night. As Mateo and I attempted to calm her two hysterically crying twins, my friend Amal and I retold the story of the torturous joint book project where we met. The contexts of my friendships with these two women have changed but the joint story of our friendship has not. And so, as we attempt to catch one another up on the years that have come between, we keep returning to some of the same themes – the stories of how we met, the setting, the times that tested us, defined us. The stories are the measure of our friendship. We become connected when we tell and receive the stories of one another’s lives. We co-create common stories with our friends through shared life with them.
This is also the function of the four gospels. Our most sacred text is about co-creating a tradition by telling a story. Remembering the beginnings and the endings, marking the miracles, preserving the details. In telling the story we re-create our community. When we hear and retell the stories of the life of Jesus, we act as participants in a larger story that includes us too.
Setting
As Chris has very artfully demonstrated in pulling together a theme for today’s service – the setting of the story matters. Our Gospel writers were almost certainly based in different contexts with Matthew writing for a predominately Jewish audience, Mark writing for Romans, Luke for Greeks and John for Gentile Christians. And the settings between the four Gospel accounts do not always match – some have Jesus appearing after resurrection in Emmaus, others in Jerusalem. There seems to be a dispute as to the location of the Last Supper as where the bulk of Jesus’ ministry took place. But the four accounts do take place in concrete geographical space and the singular story takes this sense of place into account.
While the power of the psalms often recall more generic space – our psalm this afternoon recounted mountains, rivers and seas; the gospel accounts are typically quite specific. Our reading from Luke specifically locates the action in Jerusalem and the Mark passage notes both Jerusalem and Bethany. These details help to ground our experience of the story.
Each Sunday afternoon we gather in this space, this point defined by particular sounds, smells and, I would hasten to add, particular (cold) temperature. This locality is also part of who we are – our joint story specifically recalls this place. This space in this community and our LMC in Highgate are interwoven in the story of who this community is. In our liturgical intercession this morning, we concentrated on the context of our urban environment – recalling the spaces of community, the spaces of suffering and praying together for the wholeness and healing of this particular context. This too is part of the story of who we are as a congregation.
Our story as Christians and our story as a congregation is rooted in both an ancient story and a contemporary story – we are suspended between these two narratives, trying to live lives that are compatible with each.
Points of View
Many biblical scholars have made much of the significant differences between the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke and the Gospel of John. Again with the background on words – the word synoptic literally means “seeing with the same eye” and refers to the fact that the gospel accounts of the Matthew, Mark and Luke seem to have much more in common than the account of John.
Depending on your particular upbringing, political orientation, literary preferences, you probably have your own favourite gospel. Some of the accounts focus more on parables, others take a more expository slant. Some emphasize the humanity of Jesus while others seem to concentrate more on his divinity.
Styles aside, the gospels cannot seem to agree on several points of data regarding Jesus....He performed either 29,23 or 10 miracles. He retold either 31,13, 37 or 3 parables. It is unclear exactly who carried the cross and who was there to witness the empty tomb. We are not sure exactly how involved Jesus was with exorcism or with interacting with scribes – accounts vary dramatically.
And all of this is really ok I think. Even the stories with which we are most intimate and familiar look different from different contexts and different storytellers. I think that a few of you may have been around to hear Mateo and I recount the story of how we met – a story which is consistent only in the most obvious of ways. We agree on who the central characters are and we agree that we met in a Spanish language class. Beyond that, there is discrepancy. We have not yet agreed on the canonized version of our story. And since Mateo is not with us this morning to guarantee that you hear his side of the story, I will just tell you this – in one account, the character of Mateo offers, with unrelenting enthusiasm, countless invitations to go on dates – all of which are soundly refused by the character of Emily who feels both burdened and secretly thrilled by the flirtation of this British stranger. In the other account, the character of Mateo helpfully and professionally points out a number of venues and public events which would be of mutual interest to both parties given their common interest in international public policy. Purely professional.
Two accounts – one story.
And more recently we have had to acknowledge a few other voices. On our most recent trip back to the States, we were attending the wedding of our friend Jenny. Jenny was actually in the class where we met – the only person that had a front row seat to our courtship back when we were (mateo) and (Emily) not (mateoandemily). Hearing Jenny’s account of our meeting story is therefore very intriguing to us. When I recently asked her what she remembered – she dramatically rolled her eyes and commented on how INCREDIBLY irritating we both were. “Mateo was constantly flirting with Emily” (I like this detail as it affirms my account of the story) but she continues “and Emily was pretending to need help in Spanish so she could keep leaning over and asking Mateo questions” (not my version of events). But Jenny, looking radiant in her wedding dress, brightens up and says “who would have guessed you would be married and here for my wedding? The whole story is just so unexpected!”
Indeed. And hearing Jenny’s account of the events enriches our own story. This is the value of the communal storytelling project.
The New Testament is a grand communal storytelling project – attempting to retell one of the most riveting and pivotal events in history. In a sense, the Christian story is a written account of the early community telling itself the story of itself. For there to be discrepancies in details is not an inconvenience, it is a richness, adding texture to the events. The Gospel of Matthew is the “thinking gospel” and concentrates on law, logic, order. The story of Jesus is the story of fulfilment of Jewish prophecy. The Gospel of Mark is the gospel of grace – the disciples are portrayed as hopeless, fumbling idiots and it empowers us by helping us to believe that if the disciples manage to be good followers of Jesus, so can we. The story of Jesus in Mark is the story of a person of action, Jesus acts in history and the disciples try to make sense of what it all means. The Gospel of Luke is the solidarity story – the place in which the most stories of solidarity with the poor occur. Jesus in this account is a philosopher and a teacher, an engaged activist on the side of the oppressed. And finally, the Gospel of John is the mystic story with high Christology and Jesus is the divine incarnation, the embodiment of God on earth.
This week, as a church community, we expect to hear news that will significantly shape our story. We are bracing ourselves for a twist in the plot; we are aware that there may be a possible change in the setting in our future. Regardless of what we hear, I believe it will be ever more important for us to keep telling each other the story – the story of who we are, the story of what we believe. And I know, we are up to the task.
Something I like about this congregation is that you appreciate a good story – and we have such rich story tellers amongst us – we have writers, and bloggers, we have film reviewers and theatre reviewers, we have people who sell books, we have actors. We are people who tell stories, people who can appreciate the power of a well told story.
I want to leave you with a poem called The One Certain Thing by Peter Cooley, poet from New Orleans, writing about the importance of language, words and stories. The poem is addressed to his children and is his attempt to explain how words preserve moments and people in time. When I first read it, I was struck by how this poem might also be applied to what might have gone through the thoughts of the gospel writers as they penned the words that became our canon. So when you hear it, I want you to ponder both of those directions.
The One Certain Thing
A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.
I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now—
this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here,
alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.
Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?
You are the person come to clean my room;
you are whichever of my three children
opens the drawer here where this poem will go
in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.
These are the words from immortality.
No one stands between us now except Death:
I enter it entirely writing this.
I have to tell you I am not alone.
Watching you read, Eternity’s with me.
We like to watch you read. Read us again.
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