I’m drawing, somewhat, on a book by Laura Hunt for this week’s reflection. Hunt has written perhaps the only book which explains in detail how one can read John’s portrayal of Jesus as a picture of an ‘ideal type’ Roman emperor. She uses sophisticated methodologies to develop this idea and her book is worth a read if you have a taste for academic work and a library copy available to you (it’s somewhat expensive to purchase).

The gospels are full of parables. Parables of Jesus, and parables about Jesus. The kind of writing we find there, invented long before the enlightenment understanding of ‘fact’ is, to modern and post-modern readers confusing and elliptical.

Among the host of familiar stories in Mark’s gospel is the story of the widow’s mite - where Jesus and his disciples watch people paying the temple tax and Jesus notes how a poor widow pays more than anyone.

This week’s venture into the lectionary is suitably spooky for the time of year - as we hit ‘John’ telling the spoooooooky tale of the very dead ‘Lazarus’ being resuscitated.

There are tonnes of interesting things in this passage, the story of ‘blind’ Bartimaeus, and several mysteries to ponder. It begins with a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ visit to Jericho, the world’s oldest city, followed by a remarkable encounter between Mark’s Jesus and a blind beggar with a strange name. The story is revisited by the other synoptic evangelists - but without the repetition of that strange name which I think is important for Mark.

On the 28th of October 312CE, The Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. He believed, or said he did, that Christ had helped him triumph over his rival Maxentius, as a result he was about to make Christianity the religion of empire.

There are some wonderful, eye-opening, mind-expanding curiosities to get your teeth into in this week’s passage which is all about Jesus’ encounter with a rich young man. Trouble is, most people seem to get caught up in the eye-catching ‘easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle’ phrase, trying to decode it for hidden meaning. Could there have been a gate known as the ‘eye of the needle’?

There are key moments in the gospel according to ‘Mark’ where Jesus’ “mission” becomes quite clear. He was creating a new system in the shell of the old one, a network of ‘households’ where a different way of living was put into place. Many of us rail against the injustices and evils of exploitation, prejudice and hierarchy, part of the genius of Jesus as a man was that he demonstrated a genuine alternative.

In the reading this week John asks Jesus about someone who is ‘casting out demons’ - but isn’t ‘following us’. Someone, in other words, who isn’t part of the in-crowd. The reading follows on from the previous week’s discourse about ‘greatness’ and the link shouldn’t be lost.

The lectionary is spooling through the greatest hits of the Gospel of Mark at the moment, and this week’s passage is another stone cold classic - Jesus notes his disciples arguing, asks what they were fighting about and finds them strangely silent on the matter. “For on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.”

There’s a huge amount we could say about the gospel passage set for this week by the common lectionary. Not only does it contain one of the most famous phrases in the Bible - certainly a ‘top forty’ entrant, if perhaps not quite a ‘top ten’ - but it functions as the key pivot point for the Gospel, packed full of symbolism.

Today’s brief write up is a reflection on the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, which forms part of the gospel reading set for this week.

One of the main differences between the gospel of John, where we’ve been for the last few weeks, and the gospel of Mark to which we now return, is the way that the book is written. ‘John’ is highly schematic, it has styles and themes, and uses clever storytelling techniques.

The several weeks that the lectionary readings have spent in John’s gospel is nearly over, and with that, in the UK at least, the summer holiday season also draws to a conclusion. Soon we’ll be back to Mark’s breathless prose and to school too.

The gospel reading this week is part of the ‘bread of life discourse’ which is a continuation of the last couple of weeks readings from the gospel of John. The discourse follows directly after the ‘sign’ of the feeding of the 5000, and this part of the passage has at its heart one of the famous 'misunderstandings’ that are so characteristic of the writing found in ‘John.’

“Who are the Christians that really like the gospel of John?” My youngest asked me one day, after coming home from a trip away during which there had been an encounter with some street evangelists. “They kept saying, ‘the gospel of John, the gospel of John…’” I was told, as the whole conversation was played back in detail.

Even in my working-class, non-college educated neighborhood, we heard sermons quoting writers whose work I’d later read for myself — Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, the Niebuhr brothers, William Sloan Coffin, Thomas Merton, and Harvey Cox. Indeed, people talked about the Niebuhrs so much that I thought they lived in our neighborhood. Theologians were among the first intellectuals I knew (novelists would also be on this list).

There are seven ‘I am statements’ attributed to Jesus in John’s gospel, among them ‘I am the bread of life’ - which appears at the end of this week’s gospel passage.

The lectionary gospel passage this week is basically the second half of the sixth chapter of Mark, with the exciting middle bits removed. Those exciting middle bits being, of course, the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus walking on the water.

The gospel passage this week, which narrates the story of the death of John the Baptiser, takes us into the world of, arguably, the biggest villain of the Jesus tradition: Herod Antipas.