We think of Easter week as one story: entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Last Supper, arrest and trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. Liturgical performance, with a convenient hiatus between Palm Sunday and the long East weekend, reinforces the point. But I will suggest here that it is actually two stories—interconnected obviously, but playing out on very different levels—and that this narrative distinction may have some relevance for how we think about the mission of the church today. We’ll confine ourselves to Luke’s account, but the same point could be made from Mark and Matthew.

The current issue of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly includes my article “When the Fullness of the Time Came: Apocalyptic and Narrative Context in Galatians.” It’s only available to subscribers for the time being—and, of course, in libraries—but here’s the abstract and a brief overview of the argument with a couple of diagrams.

I was almost persuaded the other night, sitting outside a pub in Glasgow with some Communitas friends, that the story about Jesus inviting himself into the house of Zacchaeus has been widely misunderstood. The suggestion was that Zacchaeus was all along a righteous tax collector, who welcomes Jesus into his home with a clear conscience. The crowds assume that he is a “sinner” only because he is a tax collector, and so they start grumbling; but Zacchaeus defends himself before Jesus.

Thanks to James McGrath, I’ve been fretting a bit more over the “fishers of people” saying in Mark 1:17 and Matthew 4:19. In his commentary, Hagner decides in the end that it “refers in a general way to the work of the new disciples, who are now to be concerned with drawing men and women into the kingdom of God.”

This reflects a fairly common way of thinking about the phrase. It’s misleading, in the first place, in that the kingdom of God was not a present reality, into which people were evangelised and baptised, but a future reality that you had to wait for.

I was asked whether there is any connection between the condemnation of lust in Matthew 5:27-30 and what is said about marriage in Jeremiah 16. I suggested in the last post that the sayings in the Sermon on the Mount about being thrown into Gehenna are Jesus’ reworking of the prophet’s denunciation of Israel in Jeremiah 7.

Ron got in touch to say that he’s persuaded by the argument that Gehenna in Matthew stands for a historical judgment. He can see how this makes good sense of the sayings about anger, hypocrisy, retaliation, and love of enemies, which presuppose a context of conflict and violence. But how is looking at a woman lustfully (Matt. 5:27-30) connected to the war against Rome and the destruction of the temple?

John Walton must know a lot more about the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 than I do—it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and, of course, he is an eminent Old Testament scholar. Still, I am not persuaded by his argument in a recent Christianity Today article, “Beware Our Tower of Babel,” that the builders were “exploiting a relationship with God”—with the practical application that our own approach to God sometimes “reeks of transactionalism.”