You Can Be Serious!

David Wilbourne

Description

This inspiring York Course on John’s Gospel, the most mysterious of all the gospel accounts of the life of Christ, invites us to meet Jesus afresh . . . an ideal study for Lent or any time of the year

‘Both vintage and fresh David Wilbourne . . . [His] gift is to enable us to see again the face of Jesus delightfully present with us through our Lent journey.’

GRAHAM USHER, BISHOP OF NORWICH

Whatever our church denomination, we all use the same Sunday Gospel from the Revised Common Lectionary. Year A focuses on Matthew, but during the first five Sundays of Lent, four of the Gospels are curiously from John. By basing each of the five sessions in this course on the previous Sunday’s Gospel, David Wilbourne provides a brilliant connection to the preaching and teaching that has just taken place.

Serious yet full of life and humour, the course covers:

Session 1: Temptation . . .

On checking every word that comes out of the mouth of God

Session 2: Strangers in the night . . .

Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of darkness: finding God in surprising places

Session 3: The winner takes it all

‘You worship what you do not know’: upping our game with worship

Session 4: I was blind but now I see

‘A god who can be understood is no god’

Session 5: Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!

Contrasting events in John with parables in the Synoptics

The course booklet is accompanied by a lively CD, in which David Wilbourne and guests from various denominational backgrounds, put forward their thoughts on the themes of the course.

This York Course is available in the following formats

Course Book (Paperback 9781915843012)

Course Book (eBook 9781915843029 both ePub and Mobi files provided)

Audio Book of Interview to support You Can Be Serious! York Course (CD 9781915843050)

Audio Book of Interview (Digital Download) 9781915843043

Transcript of interview to support You Can Be Serious! York Course (Paperback 9781915843005)

Transcript of interview (eBook 9781915843036 both ePub and Mobi files provided)

Book Pack (9781915843067 Featuring Paperback Course Book, Audio Book on CD and Paperback Transcript of Interview)

Large Print (Paperback 9781915843722)

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie
• Devotional
• Devotion
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: SPCK
• Date de parution: 19 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781915843029
• Langue: English

Extrait

INTRODUCTION
I have preached and led courses for 40 Lents – a Lent of Lents! The different contexts I’ve ministered in and learned from as priest and bishop have seasoned my Lenten thoughts, along with a host of books I’ve read, written and reviewed.
Did the advent of Covid-19 and subsequent lockdowns, though terrible, cause you to pause or undertake projects you’d never dreamt you’d have time for? I revisited the Maths and Further Maths A levels I’d studied as a teenager. It proved an all-consuming, enjoyable activity, but also brought me up short and made me determined to apply the academic rigour used by mathematicians in reflecting on my faith.
One thing Christians have in common is that every Sunday the same Gospel reading is used at their main act of worship. The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) sets out a three-year cycle, with the five Sundays in Lent 2023 (Year A) featuring one reading from Matthew and four readings from John. John is often treated like a poor relative to the other three Gospels, with scholars doubting his historical veracity, so I thought it would be good to reflect on the previous Sunday’s Gospel and see what John had to say. To lighten things I have drawn on favourite songs for the titles of each session – check them out on YouTube!
Anthony Bloom grew up in Russia and Iran at the time of the Russian revolution 100 years back. Like many adolescents dazzled by communism, he thought the Church was tired and hypercritical and was grossly misleading people. He decided to read Mark’s Gospel to arm himself to be the Richard Dawkins of his day. ‘By the third chapter, sitting at the other side of my desk was a presence.’ The rest is history. Rather than taking on the Church, he was ordained and eventually became Moscow’s archbishop.
As I researched John’s Gospel for this course, I too felt a presence, as if I was meeting Jesus again for the first time. I treated the text seriously, wanting to draw out its quirks and qualities, with my simple prayer that you too might meet Jesus afresh and make your own connections, enabling life in all its fullness.

SESSION 1
TEMPTATION . . . Matthew 4.1–11
What is your favourite read? I highly recommend H. H. Munro’s (Saki’s) Short Stories , tight witty pieces set in Edwardian times which I have read and benefited from repeatedly. But the undoubted top of my literary pops are the Gospels. Honoured by the Church throughout the ages, they’ve daily inspired, recalled, comforted and challenged me since boyhood. I am distinctly uneasy when scholars cast doubt on any Gospel’s historicity or authenticity, claiming ‘that cannot have happened’ or ‘Christ couldn’t have said that’. The mega gospel event is the Resurrection: as Saki quips, ‘When once you have taken the impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become practically limitless.’ So taking Easter as read means I take the historicity of other miracles and events seriously. In short, I prefer my gospel jury to remain out with an open verdict; mindful that when juries return we have executions and pogroms and final solutions.
‘Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there.’
CLARENCE W. HALL
ARE THERE ORIGINALS OF THE GOSPELS?
However, I concur with Professor Martyn Percy who claimed the Bible wasn’t faxed from heaven. Nor are the original Gospels housed in some Vatican Da Vinci Code dungeon, because there are no originals, just copies, over 5,700 of them in total, dating from 300, 400 or 500 years down the line from the events described. Copying long texts is very boring: people make schoolboy/girl errors, or correct mistakes, actual or perceived, or clarify or put their own spin on what seems a confusing account. I’m fascinated by New Testament Textual Critics, who deploy mathematical rigour to sift through each of the 5,700 manuscripts to get as close to the original as possible. It’s as if all we’ve got, at best, is children from the sixteenth generation, and from them alone we have to work out what their universal common ancestor was like. The original genes are there, but with cultural and contextual shaping along the way, a cocktail of nature and nurture.
‘Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace.’
BRENNAN MANNING
JESUS PUT TO THE TEST IN THE TEMPLE
All that critical stuff doesn’t diminish my love for the Gospels, but heightens it, giving me the tools to try to crack the ultimate puzzle, which is God. I’m particularly fond of Gospel variants only supported by 2 per cent of the manuscripts, but which nevertheless punch massively above their weight. For instance, Jesus being challenged to judge the woman caught in flagrante (John 7.53—8.11) is omitted by the majority, and included only by Codex Bezae and a few later manuscripts. Even then, those few manuscripts place the episode in different places: after John 7.36, when Jesus is teaching in the Temple, threatened with arrest; or John 21.24, following the miraculous catch of Easter fish; or Luke 21.38, during Holy Week when people flocked to the Temple at dawn to listen to him. Modern translations either have the episode as a footnote or postscript to John’s Gospel, with the caveat that most manuscripts omit it.
‘The Gospel of John opens with Jesus Christ in the bosom of God, and closes with the sinner in the bosom of Jesus Christ.’
DWIGHT L. MOODY
Former Archbishop Rowan Williams concluded that, despite the weak manuscript evidence, the episode gave the strongest picture of Christ. It presents an intensely personal encounter between Jesus, a lynch mob and the accused, surprised by a mercy seat instead of a throne of judgement, whose occupier doodles in the dust before declaring his powerful but tender message of unconditional acceptance.
‘Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.’
MOTHER TERESA
One textual critical principle is that even when it is only included by a minority of manuscripts, the most awkward reading is more likely to be authentic. John 7.53ff. undoubtedly makes awkward reading for patriarchs, legalists and misogynists, which might well explain why most scribes omitted it. To this day there are clearly some who would prefer their Jesus to lead the charge and throw the first stone.
‘Never trust a leader without a limp!’
JOHN WIMBER
JESUS PUT TO THE TEST IN THE WILDERNESS
Unlike John 7.53—8.11, last Sunday’s Gospel, Matthew 4.1–11, has widespread manuscript support. Having been baptized by John, an ascetic Jesus renounces using his powers to produce bread, pull stunts or seek world domination, but then plumps for a ministry bearing the hallmarks of the very things he has renounced. He fills hungry crowds with just a lad’s picnic, he is crucified and rises again, converting Thomas and other waverers with his death wounds, and, as Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ makes abundantly clear, the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. And we have the gall to criticize politicians for reversing their election manifestos!
‘Christ hungered as man and fed the hungry as God.’
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
The devil/tempter/adversary cites Psalm 91, a hauntingly beautiful lullaby sung at Compline to soothe troubled souls prior to sleep. With the whole of Scripture at his divine finger tips, Jesus homes in on three stark texts from two chapters in Deuteronomy – maybe they were the Aliyah , the Torah portions he’d learnt off by heart for his bar mitzvah. One, Deuteronomy 8.3, seems particularly apt following a 40-day fast in the wilderness, alluding to the starving Israelites’ 40-year desert sojourn, where they were humbled to depend on God and his miraculous provision of daily manna for their survival: Man shall not live on bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God .
‘The devil frequently fills our thoughts with great schemes, so that instead of putting our hands to what work we can do to serve our Lord, we may rest satisfied with wishing to perform impossibilities.’
TERESA OF AVILA
Had I been playing Scripture tennis, I would have stuck with the Psalms and steered clear of Deuteronomy, not least because scholarly opinion is divided about how it came into existence. One of the five books of the Law, the God-dictated commands and historical narrative that Moses passed on to Joshua, Deuteronomy reads as a seasoned reflection on that epoch rather than a daily journal. Many scholars link it with the book of the Law conveniently ‘found’ during Temple repairs in Josiah’s reign in 622 bc , which then spearheaded his reforming manifesto. Other scholars claim Deuteronomy and Deuteronomic history were only formulated following the return from exile in the fifth century bc , when Ezra in his eponymous book reca