The Gospels: Beyond the Scene of the Crash

What follows is the sermon I preached this past Sunday. I’m planning to begin posting my sermons here. I began this sermon with a picture of a car crash on the screen behind me.

What happened here? Obviously, there’s been a wreck. We know that. There’s a smashed-up car lying in front of us. Fire and medical personnel are buzzing around the scene. Three people in civilian clothes that we can assume are witnesses, perhaps one of them the driver of this car, are standing by looking at the wreckage. We know that someone’s life has been changed, probably forever. But if we were looking to write a history of this crash, how would we discover what led up to this scene? To whom would we turn to discover the facts?We might turn to the witnesses first. They saw it all unfold. They may know why the car crashed, what happened first. Maybe they saw a tire go flat, or the driver fall asleep just before wrecking the vehicle. If these people were giving us a history of this car crash, they would want to note carefully every detail, and we would want to write down everything they saw to create an accurate snapshot of what happened just before this crash.We’ve used this scene-of-a-car-crash analogy often when we think about the Gospels. The authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have been viewed as four eyewitnesses to the same event who are trying their best to be true to the same historical details.This view of the Gospels has given us what are called Gospel harmonies, writings that try to take all four Gospels and blend them into one snapshot of Jesus’ life and death. Harmonies don’t work. I learned that when I was just beginning my master’s degree in theology atTrevecca Nazarene
University.

Dr. Andy Johnson, who now is a professor at Nazarene Theological Seminary, gave us the assignment of historically harmonizing all the events in all four Gospels. He gave us the assignment because he knew it’s impossible to do and he sadistically enjoyed watching us struggle. Harmonizing in this way asks us to do some strange things with the Gospels. For example, one Gospel has Jesus healing a blind man as he goes into Jericho. Another has him healing a blind man as he leaves Jericho. If you’re going to harmonize those two stories historically, you have to say that Jesus healed two blind people in Jericho, but features of these two stories tell us they’re two versions of the same background story.Perhaps the problem with viewing the Gospels as simple history, as Dr. Johnson went on to say, is that the Gospels aren’t intended just to be history books, or snapshots of the life and death of Jesus. Rather than photos which clearly show only historical detail, the Gospels are more like impressionist paintings.When you look at an impressionist painting as a whole, from a distance, you see the object of the painting. A pot of flowers, perhaps, or a field. But up close, all you see is a bunch of dots that don’t look like anything but, well, dots. The painter takes an object and makes a point, puts dots together in her or his own way, and though two impressionists may be painting the same object, their paintings will never be just a picture of what they’re painting. They’ll feel free to put the image together in a way that emphasizes light, or dark, or whatever else they want to emphasize. Maybe the Gospels are like that. Each author, none of whom likely met Jesus face to face, has felt free to tell the stories in his own way to create the bigger picture, to talk about Jesus in such a way that, when we take his individual Gospel as a whole, we know it’s Jesus he’s talking about, but we see the author’s emphasis in the painting.Certainly we can see these emphases when we read the Gospels as individual units. In Mark, for instance, there’s a secret being shared. For those who can hear it and understand it, and that’s not many people in Mark, Jesus has ushered a new age. Mark calls it the Kingdom of God. And in Mark, the kingdoms of God and of Evil are doing battle. This is a breathless tale of demon possession and exorcism after exorcism after exorcism as the kingdom of God in Jesus does war against the kingdoms of the world. Jesus will suffer for this secret, Mark tells us, and those people who hear and understand what’s going on will suffer as well. But if anyone follows Jesus to the end, he’ll be vindicated.Up until the very last verse of his Gospel, Mark is telling us Jesus’ story in this way. Kingdom versus kingdom, death versus life. In Mark chapter 5, we come across a demon-possessed man who wanders around what is basically a graveyard, scaring people and hurting himself. Jesus comes and does battle against this demon, casts him out, and sets the man in his right mind. The former demon-possessed man wants to follow Jesus as a disciple, but Jesus says no, just go and tell people what’s happened to you.At the very end of Mark, chapter 16:1-8, we’re at the tombs again. Mark tells the story of two women who come to the tomb in which Jesus was laid. They find it empty. Here’s the original Greek ending: “And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, they were afraid for…”  Mark ended his gospel in mid-sentence, as if Jesus’ secret may never be shared. He invited us to think about the fact that these fearful women did eventually go out and tell someone, that no matter how fearful they were at first, they too, like the demoniac, were set in their right mind by knowing that Jesus’ life goes on. That when the kingdom of good and the kingdom of evil come to do battle, the light which lived in Jesus will outlast the darkness in that tomb. That Jesus’ life goes on in us.Matthew will tell the story differently. Matthew and Luke are written after Mark, and they seem to have used Mark as an outline. In fact, Matthew uses 90 percent of Mark in writing his Gospel, though he shortens Mark’s stories and corrects his grammar at some points.  Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience, telling them that this Jesus is the Messiah about whom the Hebrew Bible speaks. And so, repeatedly in Matthew but nowhere else, you get the formula “this was done to fulfill Scripture.” Over and over again, Matthew makes this point. Matthew also adds to Mark’s material the Sermon on the Mount, found nowhere else in the Bible in the form it’s found in Matthew, in which Jesus re-interprets Old Testament scripture. There, only in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets: I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” In his birth story, Matthew traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham, a pivotal Jewish figure, to make the point that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. In Matthew, Jesus is pictured as a rabbi, a teacher, someone who has come to teach a new way to understand the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, which is greater than the legalistic way the Pharisees have seen it. In fact, in Jesus Matthew tells us we find the new law itself.Luke also has his point of view, and of all the Gospels, Luke’s Gospel has been most helpful to me. Luke is the counter-point to Matthew. Sure, Luke says, Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but buddy, you’d better believe he’s here for everyone, not just for them. In Luke alone, Jesus performs miracle after miracle for Gentile people. In Luke alone is this fantastic, brief story about Jesus walking through a Samaritan village on his way to Jerusalem. The Samaritans are hated by the Jerusalem Jews, and most would walk 30 miles out of their way to get around a Samaritan settlement, but Jesus goes through and tries to spend the night!! The Samaritans tell him to get out of town, and the disciples are ticked off royally. They say to Jesus, “Hey, let us call down fire from heaven on these morons.” But Jesus rebukes not the Samaritans for rejecting him, but the disciples for wanting to destroy these Gentiles. Only in Luke, this man who wants us to understand that Jesus’ message of love extends to the Gentiles, do we find the story of the Good Samaritan, who is blessed for helping a wounded man even though the Samaritans are, again, condemned by the Hebrew Bible. In Luke, and only in Luke, when Jesus heals ten lepers, the only one who returns and thanks Jesus is a Samaritan, a misfit, an outcast. What an argument Luke makes in his painting of the portrait of Jesus for the inclusion of everyone, no matter what, no matter whom.The Gospel of John is almost entirely unique. 90 percent of John’s material isn=t found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. For example, Nicodemus, water turned to wine, Samaritan woman at the well, resurrection of Lazarus, washing of disciples= feet, and the constant references to the Jews as a negative character group. There are no exorcisms in John (contra Mark), no temptation narrative, no Gethsemane prayer. Because John hasn’t used Mark’s framework as Matthew and Luke have.John is very interested in saying that Jesus is God, the one who created it all. That in Jesus we find the one whom the Hebrew Scriptures call Yahweh, the creator, and that the light in Jesus will dispel darkness from the world. This Gospel begins with these words which echo Genesis 1: “In the beginning was the Word (Jesus), and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” To an audience who were probably already believers, John seeks to strengthen faith.In fact, John makes an important point that we should keep in mind when reading any of the Gospels. The author of John writes this: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you may have life in his name.” This reminds us that a Gospel writer wasn’t like a current-day biographer. This wasn’t a person who went to the library and read old letters to figure out the subject and write an accurate history. The Gospel authors were passionate believers who were writing so that their readers might also believe, and they seek not just to relay cold facts, but to interpret the life of Jesus.

Perhaps when we see the personalities of the authors and their interests in their writings, we’ll be caused to think about the points they’re making about Jesus, who he is and was and what his life means to us. I hope that in this cultural battle in which fundamentalists are yelling that either every historical jot and tittle is newspaper-true or the Bible is worthless, we can stand up for a reading of the text that allows the Bible and its authors to speak a little more freely. We need not squabble about whether Jesus healed two blind men, or one going into Jericho, or one coming out of Jericho, but it might do us all some good to ask, what does it mean that Jesus opened the eyes of one who was willing, a poor man about whom no one else seemed to care much? Would I stop in the middle of a parade in my honor and love one like this? Or am I that blind man?