Summary
Ash Wednesday - Good Friday, Gospel of John
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Extract
Preaching helps.
Ash Wednesday--Good Friday, Series B
Four Gospels, Three Years I don't know whether John is complaining. His fellow evangelists get to have whole years named after them, but we use John as supplementary material, inserting it here and there, especially in Lent and Easter. Of course, chopping up John the way we do, it is not easy to get a sense of the Fourth Gospel as a whole. It's difficult even when we step back and scan the Gospel in its entirety, asking, "What is the story in John's Gospel?" Here are two attempts to summarize the plot of the Gospel of John in a single sentence. It is of course risky to attempt summing up a complex document of some 15,400 words in a single sentence, but the exercise may be illuminating. In a book entitled Three Gospels (Scribner, 1996) Reynolds Price traces John's account of Jesus' life over several pages and then sums up by compressing the entire story into this sentence: "The force that conceived and bore all things came here among us, proved his identity in visible human acts, was killed by men no worse than we, rose from death, and walked again with his early believers, vowing eternal life beside him to those who also come to believe that he is God and loves us as much as his story shows" (p. 166). Price is a voice to reckon with. He has written twenty-six volumes of poems, plays, essays, memoirs, and novels. For forty years he has been professor of English at Duke University, and during his long tenure he has pursued his interest in the Bible and in the Gospels in particular. Because of that interest he has in recent years offered seminars on the Gospels of Mark and John, and now he has written Three Gospels. By the time he was "broiling in adolescence," he writes, he could see that "the four gospels' successful accounts of a single life, a life that was tortured and then transfigured by the dark hand of the source of creation, had not only shaped the actual Earth and the lives of its creatures through two thousand years." He could see also that "those brief accounts had also produced--as sparks from their core--the work of my early models and masters: Dante, Michelangelo, Milton, Bach, Handel, the late poems of Eliot, those stories of Ernest Hemingway that also ache for sublime transcendence, and a good many more of the props of life for millions at least as curious and needful as I" (p. 14). Price speaks of ...See the full content of this document
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