John Shearman's
 Liberal Lectionary Analysis

Rev. John Shearman

 INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

[A more complete analysis follows this brief summary for church bulletins.]

ACTS 9:1-6. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus marked the crucial turning point for the early church. As a multilingual, scholarly Jewish rabbi of the Diaspora (Jews who lived outside Israel), his controversy with the Jewish apostolic community in Jerusalem carried the Gospel beyond its Jewish boundaries. His many letters to congregations he founded began the process of creating the uniquely Christian scripture now forming our New Testament.

PSALM 30. This psalm of thanksgiving for recovery from a near-fatal illness came into liturgical use celebrating the re-dedication of the temple after the Maccabean Revolt of 165 BC. Its references to deliverance from death make it appropriate for use during the Easter season.

REVELATION 5:11-14. In John's vision, the Lamb had been given the authority to open the scroll revealing God's purpose of redeeming all of creation. The Lamb symbolized the crucified Christ whose victory over death began God's final redemption. The twenty-four elders represent the task of the church to make God's redemptive purpose known to the whole world.

JOHN 21:1-19. Scholarly consensus regards this chapter as an appendix to the Gospel. Jesus appeared in Galilee to several disciples who had returned to fishing. He showed that he had been raised from the dead by eating with the disciples. He also restored Peter’s leadership in the apostolic church in the light of Peter’s earlier denial.

ACTS 9:1-6. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus to persecute those who believed in Jesus' resurrection marked the crucial turning point for the Apostolic Church. Some scholars go so far as to say that it was the beginning of the church. They argue that without Paul and his mission to the Gentiles, the church would have remained a Jewish sect and would have vanished with the Jerusalem Christian community in the disastrous Roman-Jewish War of 69-70 CE. The only other sect of Judaism to survive were the Pharisees. Over the next two or three centuries, they evolved into rabbinic Judaism.

What exactly do we know about Paul? As a multilingual, scholarly Jewish rabbi of the Diaspora, he was uniquely equipped to carry the Gospel beyond its Jewish boundaries. He was born a Hellenistic Jew in Tarsus, Cilicia and hence a Roman citizen. More than likely he was named both Saul and Paul from birth. Tarsus was a seaport on the Mediterranean coast of Cilicia, now southern Turkey. Paul's family were engaged in commercial trade, for at times Paul made his living as a "tentmaker" or "leatherworker." (Acts 18:3) It was then necessary for a rabbi to have a trade to live by. In some respects, however, that was an unusual trade for a Pharisee to follow. The Talmud of later rabbinic Judaism regarded tanning as a disreputable occupation for the devout. Because of the odours caused by their work, tanners were forced to live outside the city walls. Simon the tanner in whose house Peter had a vision of many unclean animals being declared clean lived by the seaside in Joppa. (Acts 9:43)

Paul called himself a strict Pharisee. (Phil. 3:5). A rising party within Judaism in the first half of the lst century, they assumed the leadership of the Jewish community after the destruction of the temple. The synagogues of the Diaspora became the main centres for their teaching ministry, as for Paul himself. According to Acts 22:3, his mentor was Gamaliel, one of the leading Pharisees of the day. Gamaliel was a member of the Sanhedrin, and some have speculated that Paul was too. It is unlikely, however, that this council of elite Jews with limited administrative and policing powers, had yet become the rabbinical court which later created the codification and commentary of rabbinic law in the Talmud and Mishnah after 200 CE. More probably, in Paul's time, it had a role of administering the tax system and restraining the religious fervour of the recalcitrant Jewish population on behalf of their Roman overlords.

Following his conversion, Paul appears to have had a falling out with the Pharisees while at the same time making use of his earlier loyalties in his defense as an apostle. (Acts 15:5 cf. 26:5; Gal. 1:13-14.) With a mandate from the high priest to the Jewish synagogues in Damascus, he set out to bring all the members of the Christian sect he could identify back to Jerusalem as prisoners for trial before the Sanhedrin. One commentator has suggested that Paul's mission to Damascus was "an under-cover operation" in which the prisoners would have been kidnapped and brought back to Jerusalem secretly. (Quoted from Hanson, R.P. C. The Acts, [Oxford, 1965] in A.N. Wilson's *Paul: The Mind of the Apostle.* New York: Norton, 1997.) This possibility argues strongly for Paul having a responsible position in the temple police under the authority of the high priest and very closely aligned with the Roman administration.

En route to Damascus, Paul had an epiphany which he subsequently interpreted as being met by the risen Christ. (1 Cor. 15:8) There are major discrepancies between Luke's version of this experience in Acts 9 and Paul's own description of it in Galatians 1:11-17. The two make one point in common: The Jesus-story was never the same after this "conversion." As A.N. Wilson says, "The historicity of Jesus became unimportant the moment Paul had his apocalypse." According to Wilson, Paul's genius was that "with a much broader experience of life in the Mediterranean and witness to the religious experience of people other than Jews, (Paul) had a richer language-store, a richer myth-experience, than some of the other NT writers, whose mythologies were limited to Jewish liturgy and folk-tale." (Wilson, 72-73)

PSALM 30. This is a psalm of thanksgiving by a single individual for recovery from a near-fatal illness. Vss. 1-5 reflect this life-restoring experience. The illness had brought him so near to death that his healing was like redemption from the underworld (v.3). Thus his experience had given him a very personal sense of God's favour as he offered his thanksgiving.

The next segment of the psalm (vss. 6-10) draws a picture of the psalmist's former prosperity and false confidence: "I shall never be moved." Devout though he may have been, he had overlooked the possibility that he might fall from God's favour for no explicable reason other than that God might frown on him. In his distress, he cried out for help. His lament went so far as to employ the ancient belief that a deity with no one to praise him was extinct. (vs. 9) In the end, it was God's gracious initative that saved him and gave him a new opportunity to sing God's praise. (vss. 10-11)

W.R. Taylor, the exegete of this psalm in The Interpreter's Bible (iv, 158), points to the superscription of the psalm as proof that the psalm came into liturgical use on the anniversaries of the dedication of the temple after the Maccabean Revolt of 165 BC. By then it was no longer a personal hymn of thanksgiving, but had become an expression of the nation's survival. Such references to deliverance from death also make it relevant during the Christian celebration of Easter.

REVELATION 5:11-14 This excerpt from John's vision of the scroll (vss. 1-14) has lent itself to several interpretations. According to the late Professor George Caird, the scroll contains "God's redemptive plan, foreshadowed by the OT, by which he means to assert his sovereignty over the sinful world and so achieves the purpose of creation....The redemptive plan, initiated by the archetypal victory of Christ, awaits further fulfilment in the victory of the Conquerors, which will contribute to the final victory of God." (G.B. Caird. The Revelation of St. John the Divine. Black's New Testament Commentary. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966. p. 72.)

In John's vision, the Lamb had been given the authority to open the scroll revealing God's purpose of redeeming all of creation. The Lamb, of course, is the symbol for the crucified Christ whose victory over death is the beginning of God's final redemption. To make God's redemptive purpose known to the whole world is the task of the church, "the royal house of priests" drawn "from every tribe, tongue, people and nation" (v.10) and here represented by twenty-four elders (v.8), twelve for the tribes of the Older Covenant and twelve for the New Israel, the Church.

Caird notes that John does not think of Christ "as having withdrawn from the scene of his earthly victory to return only at the Parousia. Through his faithful followers he continues to exercise his royal and priestly functions." Further, Caird identifies the similarity between John's and Paul's thinking about the cross: "God has already in the Cross reconciled the whole universe to himself (Col. 1:20), and ... to make his act of amnesty and reconciliation known to the world is the royal and priestly task of the church, the success of which is already anticipated in the heavenly Amen." (Caird, 77)

JOHN 21:1-19. By scholarly consensus, this chapter is now regarded as an appendix to the Gospel. Jesus' final post-resurrection appearance took place in Galilee where several of the disciples had returned to fishing. William Barclay clarifies the quadruple intent of the chapter: to prove that Jesus had indeed been raised from the dead; to proclaim the universality of the church; to re-establish the leadership of Peter in the apostolic church; and to point to John as the last of the apostolic witnesses. Each of these purposes is substantiated in the details of the story.

Who but someone who knew the Sea of Galilee would have been able to tell the fishermen where to cast their nets? Barclay describes how two modern travellers in the Holy Land, W.M. Thomson in "The Land and the Book" and H.V. Morton, saw something very similar to this happen. Who but a close friend would have prepared a seaside breakfast for the weary fishermen?

As in the pericope about the empty tomb, it is John who first recognizes the reality of the situation, that Jesus is calling to them from the beach; but Peter who takes action by jumping into the water and wading ashore to greet him. The fire, the fish and the bread are not merely symbolic details with which John so dearly liked to embellish his stories. They are real evidence for John's community that Jesus was alive.

The 153 fish have something more to tell us. Barclay recounts three of the many ingenious suggestions as to their meaning. He concludes, however, that the net is a symbol of the universal church which is large enough and strong enough to embrace people of all nations. Inclusiveness and diversity are its chief characteristics.

That Peter drew the net to the shore led to his later conversation with Jesus. This exchange with its thrice repeated question and command, "Do you love me?... Feed my sheep" is the way John tells how Peter was reinstated as the pastoral leader of the church. This must have had special meaning for John's community for whom the Apostle John was the dominant personality among the disciples. We know that some sense of rivalry as to who was the greatest did exist. This is John's way of saying that each had his special gifts to bring to the young church, gifts which Christ himself had fully recognized and acknowledged.

Finally, John's contribution is not overlooked. Whereas Peter was to be the pastoral leader of the church, John was the longest surviving witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Quite possibly, John had just died, or was still alive, but no longer capable of any activity. The Parousia which had been expected within the lifetime of the apostles had still not occurred. The author of the Fourth Gospel used this exchange between Peter and Jesus about John to deal with this concern in his own community. Christ will come according to his own will, unhastened by our anxiety in waiting.