There is a good pairing, in the lectionary this week, of the ‘stilling of the storm’ from Mark’s gospel, and the David and Goliath story from 1 Samuel. A ‘plain reading’ (surface level) take is easy - something along the lines of having faith, trusting that God can/will do miracles. In other words, that reading insists that faith alone is enough - that solves all our problems.

In the passage from Mark this week we have the famous story of the mustard seed - preceded by a slightly less famous story about sowing seeds. The mustard seed story is famous because its colourful: Jesus basically says ‘the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, it starts off tiny but then it grows massive and birds come and nest in it.’ On a number of levels, the birds bit is a nice touch, I think.

The Gospel reading this week is one of the more obscure, and even dense, parts of ‘Mark’ - it takes a typically concentric shape, beginning with Jesus’ family who are convinced he has gone out of his mind.

I’m not very old (depends who you ask, I guess), but I’m old enough to remember vigorous campaigns to ‘keep Sunday special’ and other initiatives that tried to stem the tide of ‘creeping secularism’. I suppose that perhaps there are similar initiatives today, but they don’t seem to make a ripple - that boat has well and truly sailed.

This week’s lectionary readings pair Mary’s song (The Magnificat) in ‘Luke’ together with Hannah’s song from the start of 1 Samuel.

There’s an embarrassment of riches for anyone due to preach on this Trinity Sunday,

The readings offered from the Hebrew Scriptures are Isaiah 6:1-8 and Psalm 29 - each proposing dramatic visions of the divine, then Romans 8:12-17 speaks of the Spirit of God, while the gospel passage is ‘sonship’ focussed, telling the story of Jesus’ meeting with the pharisee Nicodemus and the subsequent confusion over being ‘born again.’

This week we are dealing with Pentecost Sunday, so among other things the lectionary has the narrative of Pentecost from Acts, as well as precursor gospel reading as well as the ‘valley of dry bones’ reading from Ezekiel.

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.