Lection and Liturgy

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...

17th century icon of St Mark via Wikimedia Commons Unlike Matthew’s carefully introduced and triumphantly concluded story, Mark begins fairly abruptly and ends even more suddenly than it begins. That beginning reflects a sense of pace that Mark injects into his gospel; Jesus is constantly on the move, and his mission is presented with a sense of urgency fitting to a figure who is announcing that the kingdom of God has come close. When I looked at the book of Daniel , I commented that it helped establish a new literary genre. That genre, where the secrets of God’s heavens are revealed in visions so that people know how to live faithfully in the present, is called “apocalyptic”, from the Greek word for uncovering, or unveiling in the sense of revelation. Mark begins and ends Jesus’ story with unveilings. In the account of his baptism, Jesus sees a vision and hears a voice. He sees the heavens torn apart, and God’s Spirit coming down; he hears a declaration that h...

In yesterday’s post on Matthew , I looked at some of his key themes. Today I want to develop that further, by looking at what seems to be a fairly complicated relationship between what we would nowadays call Christians and Jews. In Matthew’s context, both communities are made up of Jews, one a community that believes in Jesus as the Messiah, and one that doesn’t. Matthew’s group of Jesus-believing Jews may include some non-Jews, but his book seems mainly directed to Jewish believers in Jesus. Matthew – page from the Lindisfarne Gospels As he writes, Matthew seems keen to refute any suggestion that Christianity is a more relaxed approach to God’s demands for a holy life. He is quite clear that the new covenant promised by the prophets, and sealed by Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a more perfect way of obedience to God. In the polemics between Jesus and various Jewish teachers, we probably hear an echo of arguments between Matthew’s church assembly and his local s...

This will be the first of two posts on Matthew’s gospel. As he tells the story, Matthew showcases both his admiration for, and frustration with, Mark’s version of Jesus’s life. We see his admiration, because he adopts Mark’s basic idea, and often follows him almost word for word. We see his frustration because while Mark describes Jesus as a teacher, he includes very little of Jesus’ teaching. Matthew, by way of contrast, has gathered together a wide range of Jesus’ teaching, which he often presents in extended teaching sessions, beginning with the collection we now know as the sermon on the mount. 1 St Matthew and the Angel, attr. Karel van der Pluym (c.1660) via Wikimedia Commons However, Matthew does not begin there, but with an introduction skipped over by most modern readers, which is also omitted from the lectionary. Matthew begins with that Old Testament standby, a stylised genealogy. Jesus, who do you think you are – a potted family history. This neatly divides ...

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...