The Gospels

Our blog doesn't really have a theme. We don't write frequently enough for one to emerge. It's a bit random, but that's OK I think. We just pop stuff down occasionally, as and when 'stuff' crops up, and we have time and memory to post. 

Some 'stuff' has been cropping up for a while now relating to the gospels - the four of them at the start of the New Testament. I think this has been brewing since about 1993! 

Here's the background.

[And a disclaimer: none of this is likely to be particularly new or noteworthy for anyone reading this: it's all rather Noddy-ish, but I don't think that means it's not useful - even if only for me, a bear of little brain, to properly take note and make real progress. Enough flannel.]

Being a member of a good UCCF [IFES Great Britain for the uninitiated] Christian Union from 93-96 I was enormously privileged to take part in the very first 'gospel project', the fruit of Nigel Lee's walk with the Lord. This was called 'The Big Idea' (can't find it on google anywhere!) and was based on giving thousands of copies of a specially-produced Luke's gospel to students across the UK. (Anyone reading this remember that?) We saw a number of people become Christians at Birmingham.

A big part of the project was studying the whole book in our CU small groups so we were learning from God's word ourselves, and being prepared and equipped to engage meaningfully with others as we offered it.

Dave Burke, now (I think) a pastor in North East England was the main speaker at a mission week and I remember him saying to us at one point, perhaps in the preparatory house party, that a serious Christian will build in to his regular Bible reading a continual revisiting of the four gospel books. I sort of took it on board.

Three years later we repeated the project nationally, this time using John's gospel, calling it Breakthrough. Again, good stuff. We spent loads of time in Birmingham studying John and preparing simple evangelistic Bible studies. (One girl converted through that project  - unknown to me at the time - ended up sitting in our kitchen in Athens about five years ago. I wrote about it here.)

A few years later we were heavily involved in the Identity project, based on Mark, whilst on UCCF staff in the East Midlands, and I began to get to know Mark well (really for the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to say). Since then - 2001 - I've had cause to go back to Mark again and again - on Paros every year, for example, and not got bored yet! Even yesterday, sitting with Giannis in Starbucks to help him prepare for his small group Bible study tonight in west Athens, we were in Mark 4 and I saw something that I'd never noticed before, despite hearing the definitive teaching series on the whole book at Beeston Free [seeds are very growy things…] and despite having studied Mark 4 dozens of times in the past 12 years.

This is turning out longer and windier than I'd expected. Sorry.

Anyway, thanks to UCCF and Beeston Free I'd had good training in three of the four gospels (although Luke is a bit hazy) but really had never seriously gotten into Matthew. Everyone knows some bits of the book, of course, and some bits are rather over-quoted, if that's possible, but hardly any of us know the book as a whole. In some ways that's neither here nor there but we've noticed all sorts of significant issues in ministry and church life and discipleship that often stem from a mishandling of the gospel books.

Here's an example - and the spur to write this post this morning - from Matthew, which I've at long last got round to studying properly. I've just been reading Matthew 2 and something made me glance over to chapter 10. You know how people often take the 'what would Jesus do?' kind of approach to life and ministry? I've long thought it was a faulty question, starting at Birmingham when some CU members were agitating for the CU to take on a broader approach to our mission on campus 'because Jesus wasn't only about evangelism'. Well, true, but our CU commitment to evangelism on campus wasn't a result of saying 'Jesus did evangelism so we will too'. The gospel books don't work like that. When people talk about Jesus doing all sorts of things and we ought to do them too, it's often out of a motivation to make more of Jesus, and with a concern that a more conservative reading seems to seek to limit the ministry of Jesus and limit the ministry of the church. The sad irony however is that it actually ends up making less of Jesus and more of us, because it easily results in missing the point that the gospel books are trying to make about Jesus - who he is and what he came to do - that has much less to do with what we're to do and much more to do with what we're to make of him.

Anyway, the example from Matthew 10 made me chuckle because if one takes the approach of 'do what Jesus did' we'd have to end up disobeying the Great Commission - the over-quoted bit of the book. In Matthew 10:5 Jesus explicitly tells the disciples to NOT go to the Gentiles. So are we supposed to take the gospel to all nations or not? Jesus says not to! How are we supposed to read that kind of book when at one point we read that we're not supposed to go to the Gentiles and later on we are? Which command do we disobey? (These are rhetorical questions by the way!)

The long and short of this meander is that we've got to learn to read those books properly. If we don't we go wrong in all sorts of directions. It's not rocket science.

This book is really helping with this whole issue. It's worth a read if anyone's interested in getting into the gospels better, though the main job is for us just to learn to read the gospels as books, rather than as a series of disconnected passages that we don't quite know how to use. Perhaps one of the questions, rather than 'what would Jesus do?', is 'what are we supposed to make of Jesus given that he did that?'

Forgive the blather, if you've got this far. Dave Burke was probably right to say that we should be regularly in the gospels, especially if by doing so we learn to read them well, appreciate Jesus more deeply, trust and love him more fully, and set about helping to encourage fellow-believers to stop missing his point so regularly.