Lection and Liturgy

Triptych of Pentecost by the Florentine artist Orcagna (Andrea di Cione). Via Wikimedia Commons . As in most early representations, the Mother of the Lord is central. As I turn to a book that is unique in the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, I note that the lectionary uses it in a unique way. The church reads the stories of the earliest churches during the Sundays of Easter in place of a reading from the Old Testament. My title reflects that: it comes from a saying frequently attributed to St Augustine “We are an Easter people, and ‘Alleluia!’ is our song.” 1 The Acts of the Apostles stands in a genre of its own among canonical literature, though writing legendary “Acts of …” various apostles became something of a literary pastime among the early Christians. It clearly shares a great many of the themes of Luke’s Gospel, to which it forms the sequel. If Luke’s gospel was largely the story of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, the Acts of the Apostles is the story of ho...

In my first post on Luke , I noted how important Jerusalem was for the way he tells his story. The story begins in Jerusalem with Zechariah’s temple service, and ends there too with the disciples in the temple praising God. From the time of the transfiguration, Luke talks of Jesus journeying to Jerusalem, arriving there on that first Palm Sunday. And in his second volume, Luke tells the story of how the good news is carried from Jerusalem at the beginning of the story, to Rome, the heart of the empire, at the end. The story of the transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36) is a key moment. Unlike the other gospels, Luke provides some content for Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah during the transfiguration. This story in all three synoptic gospels should be read as owing much to the literary genre of apocalyptic: a conversation with heavenly figures that (explicitly only in Luke) reveals the significance of what is happening in history. While all three synoptic evangelist...

The comedian Emo Philips used to have a great one-liner: When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. St Luke has more about repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’ ministry than the other gospels, and in a way his take on it is as strange as Emo’s. Luke’s Jesus is very much the friend of sinners. Detail from an icon of St Luke in Great Lavra monastery on Mt Athos; via Wikipedia It should be said straight away that Judaism was very much in favour of repentance, and was always happy to see sinners engage in it. It’s just that some of those who clashed with Jesus didn’t recognise people’s responses to Jesus as repentance. Repentance was laid out clearly in the law. It involved making sacrifices and reparation, and amendment of life. Partying with Jesus didn’t look much like that kind of serious acknowledgement of sin. I want to look at three specific exampl...

If (as I noted yesterday) Mark feels rushed, Luke feels well-paced. Unlike Matthew he does not collect Jesus’ teaching into long sections, but intersperses it with stories. He describes his work as an “orderly account” and implies that he knows of others which aren’t! Perhaps because he is such an accomplished story-teller himself, he makes a point of including more parables than the other gospels, including two which usually number among people’s favourites: the Good Samaritan, and the parable often referred to as the Prodigal Son. Luke includes quite a wide range of material, and seems to be aiming for a rounded picture. Perhaps sometimes he includes a story because he thinks it’s too good to leave out. But this wealth of Jesus-tradition means that it is sometimes harder to detect his key themes than it is with Matthew and Mark. Because of this wealth of material, I’m going to break this section on Luke into three blog posts, over three days. Anonymous 18th century Russian icon o...

The order of the biblical books is is not accidental but deliberate. The Old Testament ends with prophecy. The New Testament begins with the gospel that puts the greatest stress on Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy. This is Matthew’s version of the story of Jesus. The canonical order is almost certainly not the order in which the gospels were written. In a rare instance of near universal academic agreement, biblical scholars think that this sub-genre of ancient biography was invented by Mark: the first person to write a gospel. The four evangelists, gospel book cover. Photo © Philip Barrington There is also universal agreement that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are in some way interrelated. After that scholars begin to part company. The majority think that one key relationship between the gospels is that Matthew and Luke both adapt Mark in different ways. They tidy up his story (and his grammar!) and supplement it with a range of additional stories they val...

Yesterday I looked at public reading in Nehemiah 8. Today we’re jumping forward to the gospels, and Jesus being invited to read the lesson. At the beginning of his account of Jesus’ ministry, Luke chooses to emphasise and elaborate the story of Jesus preaching at Nazareth. The first part of the story (before it all turns a bit sour) goes like this. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then h...