Today's preaching and the use of the Gospels
Author: Nick Jowett
Nick Jowett is a former Chair of CAP (Church Action on Poverty) Sheffield and former Vicar and Methodist minister at St Andrew's Psalter Lane Church, Sheffield. |
I’ve been retired from fulltime parish ministry for some years now, and that’s allowed me to hear more sermons than I could when I was a vicar. As someone strongly influenced by a historical and critical approach to the gospels, I’m particularly interested in how much other preachers allow these aspects to influence their preaching.
On the basis of the random selection of sermons heard during these years, I’ve come to the following, very unscientific, conclusions about preaching from the gospels.
What I think has borne fruit in general preaching is the research from the second half of the twentieth century into the political and sociological context of Jesus’ life and ministry. Preachers are very aware of the issues of poverty and wealth, of social stratification including the fact of slavery, of life expectancy, of agricultural life, of the realities of Roman domination and of their effect on the words, actions and choices of Jesus in the Jewish homeland. They are also often au fait with Jewish life and culture in Jesus’ day and with the different contemporary groups and movements within Judaism, even though there is still a tendency to speak, inappropriately, of ‘outcasts’ in relation to the purity system or to ascribe to the Pharisees more power and malevolence than they almost certainly had. Jesus’ role as a healer has been notably emphasized in much writing on the historical Jesus, and this role and the harsh realities for those requiring healing are not ignored in today’s sermons. Are preachers broadly aware of the issues around the sources of antisemitism in the New Testament? My limited experience hasn’t enabled me to decide that.
When it comes to miracles such as raising the dead or feeding five thousand people at once or calming a storm, however, the historians and the preachers tend to part company, and even more so in such stories as the temptations, the transfiguration and the resurrection accounts. Here the historians simply draw back, refusing to deal with ‘events’ that seem to them to lie outside their historical remit, while the preachers retreat to a fideistic position and simply discuss them as though they are reliably reported events. The intentions of the writers and the role of symbolism are simply not discussed, or, if the symbolism is mentioned, it is simply on the basis that this was part and parcel of a historical event.
The major failing I detect in the preaching I have heard is the failure to be aware of the fact that gospel texts do not only relate to the time and place which they seek to describe and present but also to the time and place of the writer. The writing of the gospels was influenced by such factors as the theological interests of the writers, the political and sociological situation and the religious communities for which they were writing, and of course the fact that a considerable amount of time had passed since the events they sought to present, allowing a tradition of historical narratives to build up. This may make it difficult to picture the events described as ‘simple raw history’, but it also adds other dimensions, as we see biblical writers striving in creative ways to communicate the truths they believe in. The classic example is the Fourth Gospel, where the writer’s concern is not to repeat the brief stories and teachings of Jesus handed down and then written up in the Synoptic Gospels, but to present anew some of the major themes of Jesus in a creative theological garb far removed from any straightforward ‘newspaper report’. We can put the situation, very positively, if we accept the role of all three persons of the Trinity in what we can call the Jesus Event: the Father sends the Word to be human and the Spirit then guides what happens, but not only from Conception to Pentecost but on into the life of the Church, and especially in the outpouring of creative literary activity through the first century. Contemporary preaching that reduces this ‘explosion of Jesus truth’ to a one-dimensional ‘this happened and Jesus said x or Jesus did y’ are selling the faith very short.
My conclusions are these.
The emphasis on the ‘happened-ness’ of the events around Jesus with the use of good historical research into their whole context is a vital part of asserting the truth of the incarnation, and today’s preachers do that pretty effectively. Jesus’ role as healer continues to emerge strongly.
I think there is still a question-mark over the issue of antisemitism; I think, for example, that there may be a residual desire among preachers to portray Jewish figures as having evil motivation or to gloss over the misleading language about ‘the Jews’ in the Fourth Gospel.
I can certainly understand the desire among today’s preachers to proclaim with confidence and joyful certainty the mystic/miraculous happenings in the gospels, such as the annunciation, the transfiguration and, above all, the resurrection. But there is a risk in too bluntly and absolutely asserting an event such as Jesus calming the storm, let alone the resurrection: the risk is that you substitute a bald and banal assertion for an opportunity to explore the symbolism of what is being presented and the sheer sense of ‘proper unknowing’ that rightly surrounds such narratives. Preachers should pick their words very carefully, balancing confidence and hope in God with a sense that we are treading into regions beyond our limited human knowledge.
Finally, I think there is an urgent need for today’s preachers to come to terms with the fact that every story in the gospels is both a story about something happening (often, though not always, with a link to something that occurred in history) and a ‘story’ about what a writer wanted to communicate to some other people and about how they chose the story and a certain way of telling it to get across their message.
We need preaching from the gospels with more than one dimension.
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