Sunday's coming!

Proverbs 25: 6-7     Luke 14: 1, 7-14 I have a confession to make. (don’t get over-excited, it’s not the sort of thing you can use to blackmail someone). Before this week I hadn’t realised that Jesus’ words of advice to a guest at a banquet – don’t assume you should have a top spot and get demoted, but take a humble place so that someone will say ‘come up higher!’ – were based on a little snippet from Proverbs. “ Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, "Come up here," than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.” Jesus is giving good practical advice about not thinking too highly of yourself & not being embarrassed as a result. But since when did the Son of God come to dispense good social advice? Just last week the lectionary reading from Luke’s gospel told us the story of the woman bent double – a ‘daughter of Abraham’, healed on the Sabbath. If you turn over a...

Today’s Gospel passage has to be one of the most memorable in the Bible. Even people who know almost nothing about the Bible often know the story of “The Good Samaritan”. When Chad Varah was looking for a name for his telephone listening service to help people who were feeling suicidal, he settled on the name “Samaritans”. But of course, when Jesus first told the story a ‘Samaritan’ was something quite different. A Samaritan was the person you least expected to help – the sort of person a self-respecting Jew would cross the street to avoid, not a person to help or to expect to receive help from. Remember how in telling the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well, John’s gospel (4: 9) states: The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans). Jesus tells this story of the man beaten up on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and sets up a scenario where the Priest an...

Luke 6: 17-26      When did a sermon last take you by surprise? For most of us – when we’re sitting in the pews, anyway – it’s time to settle down, pop in a mint imperial, and wait to hear some interesting things about God, or the Bible, or the life of Jesus. I wonder whether the crowd who first heard what we heard Jesus say today had similar expectations to us? Or has they seen enough of Jesus in action to feel that they might hear something amazingly radical? Because actually that’s what they got. “Blessed are you who are poor…   “Blessed are you who are hungry now …   “Blessed are you who weep now …   “Blessed are you when people hate you…" All this preached to people who had been told that those who are blessed by God will be rich, and fed, and will laugh and be respected. Their mindset was that surely God blesses and rewards his people with good things and punishes evildoers? People who are ill have been made that w...