The lectionary, this week, has two routes one might follow - and I’ve chosen to follow the readings which relate to ‘ascension’ which include the gospel passage from ‘Luke’ - the author of which is also understood to be the author of ‘Acts’.

The gospel lectionary reading this week follows directly on from that of last week, now the writer has Jesus continue with his ‘vine’ symbolism, but move from an emphasis on ‘remain’ or ‘abide’ to an emphasis on ‘love’. Here the virtue of love is presented as the primary ethic in the Jesus movement, the thing on which everything else depends and relies.

One theory about the four gospels is that they represent different (early) Christian communities. John’s gospel, then, would have been written for a particular Christian group, probably around about 70 years, ish, after Jesus’ death. The way it is written and the stories it contains, are, according to this way of thinking, designed to speak directly to the people of the ‘John community’.

The question arises because at least since Newton’s seventeenth-century time, science has increasingly claimed to be able to provide all the answers to all the questions about life, even though the history of science is a perpetual laying down of old certainties in favour of new developments in knowledge. At about the same time as Newton, the French philosopher Descartes was proposing that life was dualistic; there was the obvious physical world and the less obvious but equally real mental or spiritual world, and the two worlds were quite separate (dualism).

In terms of ‘greatest hits’ of the Gospels, this passage has to be in the top ten. The Good Shepherd who lays his life down for his sheep? Wonderfully evocative language and imagery, a sure fire hit.

Recently, I had the privilege to read a book by the Revd Leslie Newton – Revive us Again -which outlines his view of how the Methodist Church can promote a revival of Christianity in the multicultural, individualistic, and often atheistic, western world of the twenty-first century.

After the stories of Jesus death come those of his resurrection. In these accounts we find the material which, for some, confirm the divinity of Christ, and for others confirm the unreliability of the text.

There are some passages which just seem to deliberately create problems. Passages which contradict or at least ‘muddy the waters’ of other passages. This is one of them.

The major Christian festivals have various things in common, one of them is that they are based on stories which seem to stretch credulity.

People who, frankly, know a lot more about the New Testament than I do sometimes take issue with my view that the mission of Jesus was a profoundly political one. Their well researched views notwithstanding though, it’s astonishingly hard for me to see Jesus role as apolitical – particularly when you look at events such as those detailed in version of the “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as detailed by “Mark.”

In an article I published on my Substack last week, I wrote about the ‘crisis of decline’ facing the contemporary church in Western Europe and North America, and the persistent theme of death and new/re birth in the Bible. I pointed out the way that the ‘grain of wheat’ image used in this week’s gospel passage speaks of the cyclical process of life, rather than the linear ‘beginning and end’ idea we tend to adopt.

This week’s gospel passage contains one of the most famous lines in the New Testament - one which is frequently held up as ‘the gospel in miniature’ - a bit like the way the Isle of Arran is sometimes described as ‘Scotland in miniature’. In both cases, the statement is something of an oversimplification.

This week we hear an account from ‘John’ of Jesus in the temple. This story is told by all four evangelists, but there is one key difference between the the synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and John’s version: In John 2: 16 Jesus says that the traders are making the temple ‘a marketplace’. In the synoptics the phrase is often given as a ‘den of thieves’. One is a legitimate economic hub, the other is illegitimate.

It was over thirty years ago when I was exploring the possibility of offering for the ordained ministry in the Methodist Church. Wesley College, in Bristol, (now closed) was holding a residential weekend for people such as myself, so I went along. It was while I was there that someone suggested that I read ‘Freeing the Faith’, by Revd Hugh Dawes, which back then was hot off the press.

Part of the genius of ‘Mark’ and/or the later translators of his work is the superbly quotable nature of of some of his passages, including this one. “Get behind me, Satan” or, if you prefer, “Get thee behind me, Satan” is such a great phrase. It bleeds through to culture in every moment we are faced with a big temptation.

This week the lectionary’s visit to the gospel of Mark skips back a little way toward the beginning of the first chapter, to narrate the story of Jesus’ baptism.

There’s a consistent tension between those who seek the ‘plain meaning’ of Bible passages, and others who, like me, seek something altogether less plain.

We take a short break from the breathless storytelling of “Mark” to visit the parable type tale of the ‘presentation’ of Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem as told by “Luke”.

The story is full of action, and full of symbolism - sometimes the fast paced text obscures the symbolic nature of the activity. In the synagogue at Capernaum Jesus runs up against one of the key groups who oppose the early Jesus movement, the so called ‘Scribes’. These are the people who copied out the books of the law, and are probably the same people referred to elsewhere as ‘legal experts’ or ‘teachers of the law’.

Such a statement would be fairly well received by most of us. It’s in line with the sort of notion we have about how the Church should express itself in the modern world. But to read or hear that from a Roman Catholic bishop might be just a little surprising.