A strange conundrum was at play by the time the writer of John’s gospel put pen to paper - how to explain the enduring nature of a Messianic sect, when - several decades after his crucifixion - the Messiah in question was no longer present?

I don’t really think that the writer of John helps himself, very much, when it comes to being understood. He mixes complexity with irony, humour with elipticism, and as a result produces looping texts that defy straightforward interpretation.

A short reflection today on the story of the healing at Bethesda, as I’m officially on a day off for reasons with which I shall not bore you.

Whether or not the gospel of John and the epistles of John were written by the same person, or people, is something that has been argued about for some time. My preferred idea is that these come from a ‘John community’ where certain teachings form the core values that feature prominently throughout.

Is there a more frequently reoccurring metaphor than that of the shepherd in the Bible? To be honest I don’t know - there are other contenders, the vine, perhaps, or ‘light’. But in any case the shepherd is up there, naturally enough, one might say, given the importance of agriculture in that time and place.

There are two dominant traditions about what happened in the aftermath of Jesus’ death in the early Christian writings. Effectively they comprise the ‘appearances’ tradition, and the ‘disappearance’ tradition. The latter first crops up, for us, in the gospel of Mark where we learn that Jesus’ body, buried after his execution, was found to have disappeared.

“We’ve got to be a bit cautious about security,” a protestor told me as they explained they’d be taking part in an organised piece of civil disobedience. “So you might not be able to get hold of me…”

The writer of ‘John’ just couldn’t help himself - he loved to instil symbolism, irony, and shocking double-entendres into his stories. In this week’s passage, his rewrite of the very familiar story of the anointing at Bethany, he adds a certain amount of ‘spiciness’ to the familiar story found in Mark and Matthew.

Although the lectionary starts at the beginning of Luke chapter 15 with a set up contextualising Jesus’ series of parables about finding things, it jumps the ‘minor’ stories, and goes straight for the big one, the story variously referred to as ‘the prodigal son’, ‘the lost son’, ‘the forgiving father’ and so on.

There are two parts to the reading this week - the first part (vv1-5) deals with some real life questions of sin/debt and suffering. The second part (vv6-9) is a parable to do with the fruitfulness, or not, of a fig tree. These two run together, but here I’m going to deal mainly with the first part.

I often find myself referring to this passage, when I talk about the role that Herod Antipas plays as ‘chief villain’ in the gospels. This is the point where, with more than a hint of verisimilitude, the evangelist has Jesus refer to Antipas (the ambitious and vengeful ‘quarter King’) as ‘that fox’. I love that. I often find the gospel writers, including Luke, unreliable narrators - but here (perhaps because of my own biases) I sense a genuine saying coming through to the surface from 2000 years ago.

I’ll begin with a confession - it’s good for the soul after all. I have a ‘go-to’ interpretation of this passage (the story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert), which forms my immediate response to hearing it. If I had no time for thought or reading, I would regurgitate that same response immediately on being presented with this particular story. So let me start there, then, with my standard spiel…

Some people take a straightforward approach to the interpretation of Biblical passages. “If there was a video camera there,” they say, “would it have recorded events as they are narrated in the passage?”

Our reading this week is a continuation of Luke’s ‘Sermon on the Plain’, and it really highlights the way that, in Luke, Jesus is the supreme teacher of ‘love’.

This week’s gospel lectionary passage is the opening section, in Luke, of Jesus’ most famous sermon. Even taken as a whole, the sermon is not all that long, although substantially longer than the nine-word sermon Jesus gave in Nazareth.

Issued by the Church of England in the autumn of 1985, it was highly critical of the negative effects its authors believed the economic and social policies being pursued by Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government were having on the poorest members of British society. Robert Runcie (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1980 to 1991) had instituted the Commission on Urban Priority Areas in 1983, to undertake the review that resulted in its publication. This was partly out of a concern he had had that the government’s free market (deregulatory) economic and social policies, may have contributed to bringing about the inner-city riots that had broken out in some of Britain’s poorest areas in 1981/82.

I first discovered his writing in the early 1990s when I was starting to explore my faith and beliefs. I was able to immediately relate to his theology of `non-realism` which answered the questions and doubts that I had been struggling with. At last, I had found someone who understood and had similar ideas to me although far better at articulating them.

Why on earth is there so much fish and fishing in the gospels? For a day labourer, a jobbing builder from the hill town of Nazareth Jesus spends a strange amount of time (the bulk of his ‘ministry’) mucking about with fishermen when he might otherwise have been on building sites. Why?

The reading this week follows directly on from last week’s narrative of Jesus’ first recorded sermon (a whole nine words!) and moves from the rapture of initial reception to a concerted attempt to put him to death.

I don’t know what the average length of time that people spend on writing sermons is, in fact I’m not sure how you’d even know. I start my prep at the start of a week, and finish it at the end of a week - which means that there’s a bit of thinking time in the middle.