The Four Gospels

The Four Gospels
sermon at Christ Church URC Church 21.10.2001

I hope Friends, that you are not expecting to hear from me this morning my reflections on the international situation. While I am convinced that no-one and no situation in this world is past praying for, I fear that some are past preaching about – at least by me. I don’t know a ready answer to all the world’s problems. All that I can do is to try, however inadequately, to point towards the teaching, example and continuing indwelling presence of Jesus Christ – the way, the truth and the life. There we will find the principles that should guide our attitudes.
When, a few years ago, my wife and I used to spend part of our holiday in Sussex, we never failed to visit the village of Bosham, on an inlet from the sea near Chichester. Its church has a long and interesting history. Part of it is Romano-British, dating from long before Augustine landed in Kent to convert the heathen English.
The main part of the church was built in Saxon times. Among its early worshippers was Harold Godwinsson, destined to become King of England and to be slain at Hastings. He is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry praying beneath the church’s clearly recognisable chancel arch. Even earlier worshippers there had been King Canute and his family. Tradition had it that Canute had a well-loved twelve year old daughter who was accidentally drowned in the mill stream that still runs through the village, and that she was buried in the nave of the church.
Although there was no documentary evidence of this, the story persisted over the centuries. In the mid-eighteen hundreds, some eight centuries after Canute’s death, the then-vicar decided to test the tradition. He asked a builder, who was carrying out maintenance work there, to excavate the nave at the point where the child was said to have been buried.
Precisely at that point the builder unearthed a stone coffin dating from the beginning of the second millennium, containing the skeleton of a twelve year old girl.
What relevance to us today has this story from the past? Simply that throughout the year, but especially at Easter and Christmas, we are all subjected to printed and spoken propaganda from unbelievers who are eager to pass on their disbelief in the Christian faith to the rest of us. A point that they often try to make is that the accounts of the life, ministry and miracles of Jesus that are to be found in the four Gospels are quite unreliable because they weren’t written down until several decades after his crucifixion
The story of Canute’s daughter forcefully illustrates the point that remembered events can be transmitted with accuracy not just over two or three decades but as many as eight centuries! The life and ministry of Jesus Christ was recorded in the Gospels either by first-hand or second hand witnesses of the events that they record, during the lifetimes of many who could still remember those events.
Considering the impact that Jesus Christ has had, and still has, on the lives of countless millions of people, we really know very little about him. Had the Gospel stories been invented they would surely have had something imaginative to say about his appearance – his height, his features, the tone of his voice and so on.
Not so; we have the story of his miraculous birth and infancy recorded in two Gospels; an incident that occurred when he was twelve years old in just one of them, and then nothing till he was about thirty years old and was baptised by John the Baptist. Then over a period of two or three years, he gathered together his disciples, taught, healed, prophesied and was cruelly put to death – but rose from the dead to complete his mission of revealing God to mankind.
Had the Gospel stories been invented, their authors would surely have made certain that they agreed in every detail – and about what was, and what was not, important. But they don’t, just as the recollections of honest witnesses of contemporary events are unlikely to agree in detail and emphasis. What the Gospels do have, is what J.B. Phillips, biblical scholar and translator of the New Testament into modern English has described as ‘the ring of truth’. They clearly come across as the honest – and perhaps sometimes puzzled – recollections of four very different men.
How very different they were too! Matthew’s Gospel, the longest and the one printed first in our Bibles – though it wasn’t the first to be written – was clearly the work of a well-read Jew determined to persuade a Jewish readership of the validity of Our Lord’s claim to be the awaited Messiah.
The Gospel begins with an account of Jesus’ lineal descent in an endeavour to establish him as an heir to King David and to Abraham. On over sixty occasions Matthew refers to Jesus as fulfilling Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah – occasionally, in fact, giving the impression that Jesus did this, or endured that, for no other reason than that ‘the Scriptures should be fulfilled’.
Because of this, Matthew’s Gospel may be undervalued by today’s overwhelmingly Gentile readership. This would be a pity because it gives the most complete story of Jesus’ life and ministry, including the story of the wise men and their gifts, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. It also gives the fullest and, in may be thought, best account of the Sermon on the Mount, a summary of Jesus’ moral and ethical teaching.
It should be remembered too that, of all the disciples, Matthew had the most to lose in following Our Lord. If Jesus’ mission failed, the fishermen could return to their boats and their nets – and, in fact, that is just what they did until Jesus convinced them of the reality of his resurrection and continuing mission. Matthew, the tax collector – the civil servant – once having abandoned his post to follow the unorthodox Nazarene teacher and healer, could never hope to return to it.
St Mark’s Gospel is very different. It was the first to be written and was clearly intended for a Gentile readership. There are no references to Jewish law and Mark makes a point of explaining words and phrases, Boanerges (Sons of Thunder) and Talitha Cumi (‘Damsel, I say unto thee arise’) for example, that would not have been understood by a Gentile readership.
Despite being the shortest of the Gospels, Mark’s account is full of observed detail – omitted from the other Gospels – that convince the reader that it was written by an eye witness of the events recounted. Here are just three examples. When Mark describes the quelling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee he says that Jesus was sleeping on a pillow in the boat; describing the feeding of the five thousand, he says that the multitude sat down ‘on the green grass’; recounting the incident in which the disciples drove away the mothers, with their children, who were seeking Jesus’ blessing, he says that Jesus was much displeased and his is the only account that records that, after rebuking the disciples, Jesus took the children into his arms and blessed them.
Tradition has it that Mark was the young man on the Mount of Olives at the time of Our Lord’s arrest who, as he says in his Gospel, was girt about with a linen cloth and who left the cloth behind and fled naked when he feared his own arrest.
Mark’s Gospel has an immediacy, an urgency in fact, that is not to be found in the other Gospels. Just as in Matthew’s Gospel we continually encounter the phrase ‘that the scripture might be fulfilled’, in Mark’s we learn over and over again, that ‘straightway’ this, that or the other event happened.
St. Luke, the author both of the Gospel that bears his name and of the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician, a faithful companion and friend of St Paul and almost certainly a well educated Gentile. Like Matthew he gives Jesus’ genealogy but he traces Jesus’ roots not just back to Abraham, the forefather of the people of Israel, but back to Adam, the forefather of us all!
It is to Luke that we owe the fullest account of Jesus’ birth and the events that preceded it.
We have too the only story from the developing adolescence of Jesus – his lingering in the Temple at Jerusalem at the age of twelve, in earnest conversation with the doctors of the law, oblivious to the fears of his worrying parents. How graphically Luke describes that parental anxiety – an anxiety that modern parents will recognise only too well if they have ever had a twelve-year old son or daughter go missing, perhaps only for a few hours.
‘Son’, says Mary his mother, ‘Why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing’.
Luke records Jesus’ reply. He was apparently surprised that they hadn’t realized that he had to be about the business of his Heavenly Father Luke adds that his mother kept all these sayings of her son in her heart (as indeed mothers do today) and that, ‘Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’.
It is surely not fanciful to suggest that these passages about Jesus’ birth, childhood and adolescence indicate that St Luke, perhaps because he was a physician, had at some time been a friend and confidant of Jesus’ mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that she had shared with him her memories of Jesus’ birth and early life.
I find it interesting that no less than three passages from the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel are regularly used in worship in some mainstream churches. The angelic salutation ‘Hail, thou that are highly favoured, the lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women’, is the basis of the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer to Mary: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’ Then there is the Magnificat, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my saviour’, Mary’s song of triumph when she had accepted as a fact that she was to bear the Messiah, and the Nunc Dimitis or Song of Simeon when the infant Jesus was presented at the Temple, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word’.
The fourth Gospel, that of St John, is quite different from the other three. The Gospel was written, probably at John’s dictation, towards the end of the first century. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection had occurred over sixty years earlier. Some have claimed that the John who, with his brother James, was called by Jesus to be ‘fishers of men’ couldn’t possibly have been the author of the fourth Gospel since he would have been nearly a hundred years old at the time that it was written.
But would he have been? When James and John were called by Jesus they were fishing with their father Zebedee who was clearly young and active enough to take charge of a fishing boat and play an active role in the fishing operation. The nickname of the two brothers was .Boanerges’, sons of thunder, which to me suggests the impetuosity of youth. James, whose name is always given before that of John in the New Testament, was presumably the elder. John may well therefore been in his teens when he was called. If that were so he would have been more than ten years younger than Jesus and would have been in his early eighties during the final decade of the 1st century.
Still pretty ancient you may think. Perhaps so, but I’m just into my eighties and I like to think that I’ll be capable of writing effectively for a little while yet. What’s more – my memory of events that took place sixty years ago is often clearer and more detailed than it is of events that took place last week!
While the other three evangelists tell us of the actions of Our Lord, John seems to probe his innermost thoughts and motives. I find his Gospel both immensely challenging and immensely rewarding. Previously from this pulpit I have declared that my Christian faith, my Quaker faith, has that wonderful preface to St. John’s Gospel – the first fourteen verses of Chapter 1 – as its foundation.
I find myself overwhelmed by the thought that Jesus of Nazareth was the Word of God, who was with God and was God from the beginning; that all things were made by him and that without him was not anything made that was made; that he was and is the True Light that is available to everyone who comes into the world.
The last time that I was here I explained my conviction that Jesus was speaking in his role as The Word and the True Light when he claimed that ‘before Abraham was – I am’ and said that he was the way, the truth and the life and that no-one came unto the Father save through him.
It seems to me that while Matthew, Mark and Luke recount the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ of the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord, John struggles throughout his Gospel to give us the ‘why’ – a ‘why’ that is really beyond human comprehension.
Jesus turned accepted values on their heads. Despite the prophecies to which Matthew constantly referred, he was not the kind of Messiah that was expected. As the Scottish poet George MacDonald put it:
They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing,
That made a woman cry.

Everybody knew that it was a good thing to be wealthy and powerful, to love one’s friends and hate one’s enemies; to respect the authority of the rulers of the Temple and to resist (though discretely) the power of Rome.
Jesus said Blessed are the poor; Blessed are they that mourn; Blessed are the peacemakers. He told them to love their enemies, bless them that cursed them and pray for those that despitefully used them. He put the will of God above that of the rulers of the Temple. He healed the servant of the Roman centurion and when asked by Roman soldiers what they must do, he didn’t proclaim ‘Romans, go home!’ or ‘Judaea for the Jews!’ but simply told them to refrain from violence, not to bear false witness, and to be content with their wages.
His message offended both the Romans and the leaders of his own people. He was cruelly put to death – but rose from the dead to found a faith that still flourishes world-wide after two thousand years. And I believe that, inasmuch as the prophets of other world religions have testified to the truth, they have been inspired to do so by his indwelling spirit, by the inward light of Christ. He was, is and always will be ‘the way, the truth and the life’.
Both Matthew and Mark record that, as he was dying, the Roman centurion in charge exclaimed ‘Truly this man was the son of God’.
Jesus’ followers were convinced, and the gospel stories have convinced me – as they have convinced millions of others – that the Word of God, by whom all things were made, ‘Was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.