Love Set Free. Martin L. Smith

      Introduction

      I gave a series of meditations on the passion according to Saint John in 1997 during the three-hour Good Friday service at the renowned Trinity Church, Boston. When they were issued as a book, Love Set Free, in the following year, they were welcomed by a wide readership as a resource for prayer and deep reflection on the meaning of the Cross of Christ for individuals and groups. It is a great joy to offer this new edition for a wider public.

      It used to be the convention that the addresses in this kind of Good Friday service should focus on the ‘seven last words’ of Jesus from the cross, gathered from all four Gospels. Instead of following this tradition, I chose to lead the worshippers in meditation through the passion narrative of a single Gospel, the Gospel of John. One reason was that, at that time, I belonged to the Society of St John the Evangelist, a religious order whose spirituality is rooted in the fourth Gospel and whose members frequently draw on its riches in retreats and preaching. In addition, I also wanted to be more faithful in meditative preaching to one of the most significant advances in biblical interpretation of the twentieth century.

      In recent decades scholars have become sharply aware of the distinctive character of each of the Gospels. In the past Christians have tended, usually unconsciously but sometimes deliberately, to underplay the differences in style and content among the Gospels and to blend them together. In the early centuries writers produced harmonies of the Gospels, composite works that wove stories and sayings from all four Gospels into one narrative. The same instincts were at work in Christian art, storytelling, preaching, liturgy, drama and theology, so that by now this blending of the four sources has become second nature to us. For example, even though strict examination shows that the stories of Jesus’ birth in Luke and Matthew are really different traditions, rather than elements that simply slot together into a whole, Christmas devotion in all its expressions quite happily combines these alternative traditions. In the same way, when we think of the passion narrative, our minds instinctively weave together elements from all four of the Gospels.

      Now it has become startlingly clear that each Gospel writer brought to the work a unique artistry. Each Gospel has a set of distinctive religious standpoints and emphases, partly reflecting the different character of the community for which it was written and partly the theological artistry of the writer. (More accurately, we should speak of writers and editors in the plural – there is evidence, especially in the case of the fourth Gospel, that the book has gone through several stages of composition.) Treating each Gospel separately in our study of the Bible, learning to compare and contrast them and differentiating among them allows us to appreciate much more vividly the urgent religious intention of each writer and the distinctive situation and mission of the community to which each belonged. Harmonizing the Gospels is second nature to us, but if we reverse that trend to heighten our sense of their uniqueness we begin to see that harmonizing can have the effect of blurring and diluting their impact. If someone were to take a computer image of a biblical scene by Rembrandt and another of the same scene by El Greco and ‘morph’ them into a composite image, we would recoil from the grotesque result and condemn the project as perverse. That is because works of art communicate with us in very rich and subtle ways by the innumerable elements of style that are distinctive to the artist.

      Far from being chiefly of interest to scholars, the great gains of the last few decades in identifying the distinctive characteristics of each Gospel are a great gift to our religious experience, our spirituality. Meditation as a spiritual discipline is above all the art of focused receptivity. It is the discipline of suspending our tendency to control and censor, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to the impact of images and symbols so that they can bring grace to bear on our inmost selves. In contemplating the images and scenes and words of Scripture, we allow the same kind of process to occur as when we place ourselves before a great work of art, not to criticize or analyse it, but to be open to its transforming power.

      If you are not familiar with the differences between the four Gospel accounts of Christ’s final days, you may find it helpful to compare them. It makes a fascinating Bible study for a group of people to do together. For example, it soon becomes apparent that Luke’s account of the final events of Jesus’ life bears the fingerprints of the evangelist’s particular interests. Luke emphasizes Jesus’ ministry as a healer, so we find that alone among the evangelists he mentions that Jesus healed the ear of the high priest’s slave after one of the disciples had cut it off in the scuffle to prevent Jesus’ arrest (22.50–1). Luke is especially interested in Jesus’ relationship with women, so he alone describes how on the way to execution Jesus spoke with a group of grieving women (23.27–31). Mark grimly records that the two bandits crucified with Jesus taunted him, but Luke, wishing to depict Jesus as compassionate reconciler, shows him promising the fellow sufferer who asked to be remembered in Jesus’ kingdom, ‘Truly I tell, you, today you will be with me in Paradise’ (23.43). Unlike Mark, who has