Sensing Grace (Deacon Chris)

 
Here we are on the last bit of Lent—how did it get to be Lent V already? Palm Sunday is next week. In fact our palms arrived this past Friday! From this perspective it seems like the season has gone by quickly though maybe that is because collectively we have done much to bring God’s love to the front of our minds. I hope it has been a productive Lent for you and if you don’t think so just yet, we do have one more week.

One of the community actions we have taken through the season has been to read passages from the Gospel of John each day. Following the pattern of the daily lectionary we are currently beginning the ninth chapter of John. Though we won’t finish the gospel before Easter it is a discipline that we can continue. When we began this Lenten journey Mother Beth talked about this particular gospel in comparison to the other three. From these comparisons I was reminded of something I learned a long time ago in counseling classes. That is, there is a difference in relating what has happened and how those actions affect us. The goal of a good counselor is to go deeper than the action. John’s gospel does this; it goes deeper.

The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often like news reports, relating the facts of what occurred. Mark in particular loved to tell one thing after another. “This happened and then immediately this next thing happened.” Of course each of these gospel writers has a slant on Jesus’ story by when they wrote and the audience for whom they wrote. We get a lot of our familiar Bible stories from these three gospels. John, though, is different. From its beginning John is trying to connect the news of Jesus life to its meaning. John writes in a more personal way and asks a more personal response. Using my analogy you might say that John is the op-ed writer while the other three give a more front page straight forward story.

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