Questions arising from Luke 21

This is really a post for any folk from St James who happen to be here.

The sermon from yesterday on Luke 21:5-38 is now available online. The text is available on this site and the audio is available on sermons page of the St James Audley website.

During the course of that sermon I invited people to ask questions between now and a fortnight’s time so that those questions can be picked up in the next sermon on Luke 21.

I was asked the same question more than once yesterday: What about the parallel passages in Matthew 24 and Mark 13? Wouldn’t you reach a different conclusion if you started in Matthew or Mark? Have I been arbitrary in picking Luke’s account? Etc.

That is a good and fair question. The reason why I spoke from the Luke account is, of course, that this sermon was part of an on-and-off sermon series in Luke’s gospel spanning the past 3 years. As to whether Matthew’s and/or Mark’s record of the same discourse point us to a different reading…

• I have given some thought to this already.
• I didn’t include any material on the synoptic parallels on Sunday, because the sermon was quite long enough as it was!
• I will do further work on that question this week, and will include something on this on Sunday 18th.
• The usefulness of the question is big but limited. Big because Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21 are all records of the same teaching occasion by Jesus. Limited because Matthew, Mark and Luke each write with very different editorial concerns. It is therefore possible for them to record the same teaching of Jesus, to do so faithfully, and yet to deliberately draw their readers’ attention to different points of significance. Put another way: Matthew and Mark will help us understand what Jesus was saying, but that is (related to but) not the same thing as helping us understand what Luke is saying.

In the meantime, that is just one question. I would still like to invite questions. One way to do so would be to use the “Comments” section at the bottom of this post to leave questions for me. If you’ve never left a comment on this blog before, it’s not scary. The e-mail address you leave won’t be published. You can even post as “anonymous” if you must.

Notwithstanding that people will (hopefully) continue to ask good questions of the material in Luke 21, my hope for 18th November and 2nd December is to use the lion’s share of the time speaking to the many and varied uses / applications that arise out of this chapter. As I said yesterday, “fulfilled” does not equal “irrelevant”.