Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

St. John’s story of Holy Week has important differences to the tale told by the authors of the other Gospels, and its stories are perhaps a little less familiar to people, especially if they aren’t regular Bible readers.

One incident not recorded in the other Gospels is that of the visitors to Jerusalem who wanted to see Jesus. These were Greeks, in town to worship at the Passover festival, who approached Philip to seek an audience with the preacher who had so recently electrified the city. Philip and Andrew went to tell Jesus about them, and at this point the Greeks disappear from the story. We do not know whether they ever got to see Christ.

Instead, John retells Jesus replying with a discourse clearly alluding to the coming agony of Good Friday – “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains that and nothing more; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.”  Why respond in such a curiously sideward way? Perhaps, this a case of Jesus, the King of Kings and Son of David, the culmination  of the ethnocentric religion of Israel, dying to give life to a harvest of believers from all nations. And here is the soil in which that harvest will begin to ripen, citizens of the multi-ethnic Roman Empire already drawn to worship of the God of Abraham and Isaac even before the establishment of Christianity.

Read more

Having spent the night after the dramatic events of Palm Sunday in Bethany, about a half-hour walk from Jerusalem, Jesus returns to the capital in the morning to preach in the Temple. Fig Monday is a day of parables, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, and many of those parables are difficult, not least the story from which the day gets its name, where Jesus, feeling peckish, stops for a snack and causes a fig tree to wither away because it had no fruit.

Let us instead turn to one which, at first glance, keeps us on familiar territory in the Gospel narratives – the Parable of the Two Sons.

A man with two sons asks them both to go and work in his vineyard. One says he will but doesn’t; the other says he won’t, but changes his mind later and gets stuck in. The latter, obviously, was the one doing what his father wanted. Jesus then tells the ‘chief-priests and elders of the nation’ that tax-collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God ahead of them: even before Jesus began his public ministry, they listened to John the Baptist when he showed them they right way to live, while the religious élite refused to believe that they were not already living correctly.

Read more

“We need more Christians in politics.” As someone whose life has largely revolved around two pillars – politics and the Church, I have heard this phrase endlessly. For a long time I didn’t question its basic sense – Christianity is, after all, not about pious churchiness but building the kingdom of God. As Isaiah prophesied “He will not fail or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law.” Establishing justice and God’s law inevitably means dealing with the rulers of the world, and that means dealing in politics.

Yet, in recent years, Palm Sunday has made me ask whether we actually do need more Christians in politics. I’m not, for a second, suggesting that Christians should actively avoid politics – I have met politicians for whom that profession was clearly God’s calling to them. But I can no longer accept the simple equation that more Christians in politics equals a more Christian politics, or that building a more Christlike society will necessarily flow from having more Christians in positions of temporal power. Indeed, the often lamentable and bloody records of states run by Christians should tell us that. Scripture tells us the same thing, in those familiar Holy Week stories.

As we are called to pattern our lives on Christ’s, let us look at how Christ behaved when presented with a golden opportunity to take on political power on that first Palm Sunday.

Read more