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A collection of 36 episodes by the celebrated author Fr Denis McBride C.Ss.R.. These reflections on Jesus and the Gospels, made to accompany the book, offer a comprehensive look into the person of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels. These reflections were recorded at Hawkstone Hall, the international pastoral centre, with a live audience.
Jesus and the Gospels, the podcast series with father Dennis McBride. The celebrated lecturer and author, Dennis McBride takes us on a journey to discover the person of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels. As an international speaker on the New Testament, father Dennis has given retreats to the bishops conferences, university lecturers, priests, laypeople, and religious congregations. His insight and good humor in addition to his storytelling and enthusiasm for the subject have touched thousands of people. These talks were recorded in front of a live audience at Hawkstone Hall, the International Pastoral Centre, where he was director of courses.
Presenter:Now you too can discover Jesus and the Gospels for yourself. Beginning of the Gospels episode one, our first images of Jesus, first images of Mark and frame of his Gospel.
Fr Denis McBride:Dear friends, welcome to this course on the historical Jesus. We're going to be looking at the figure of the historical Jesus as he's presented in the four Gospels by four different voices: Mark, Matthew and Luke and John. And everybody here will have their own particular images of Jesus and your favorite stories of him. And in a sense we're very lucky in the Christian community to have four great foundation documents of our faith which we call the Gospels. They're unique, there are only four Gospels in the world.
Fr Denis McBride:It's a particular form of literature which is unique to these four writings. And when you think about Jesus, as I say, you'll have your own particular images, but the Church always leads us back to the voice of the evangelist, the authoritative voice that speaks to us in the liturgy. And even if you were a Martian coming from outer space and you came to a Christian liturgy, you would notice that the community treats this document differently. If you go to a high mass, a formal high mass in the church, you'll notice that the reading of the Gospel is surrounded by different things. Candles suddenly appear, incense starts rising.
Fr Denis McBride:The community itself stand to respect this word. Even if you were an outsider you would notice that the community reverence this word, the Gospel, in a way that they don't the other words that get spoken. Now the Gospels are key, dear friends, to our own understanding of Jesus, but very few of us were actually introduced to Jesus through reading the Gospels. Most Catholics come to the Gospels fairly late. If you think of your own story, most people are introduced to Jesus by other people.
Fr Denis McBride:That's why I quote that little sentence from the theologian Walter Casper when he says that the starting point of anyone's faith is faith as it is actually believed, lived, proclaimed and practiced in the Christian churches. His argument is faith in Jesus can arise only from encounter with other Christians. Most people become Christians because they're attracted by the community, Often not particularly because they're attracted by Jesus. Someone in the community or some people in the community attract people to join us. From the very beginning, from the Apostolic Church, the Apostles always argued, if you want to believe in Jesus, join us.
Fr Denis McBride:In other words, come into a community of belief rather than the apostles didn't say listen to the story about Jesus and then go home. There's a kind of evangelical characteristic to the story of Christianity from the very beginning. That Christianity is about belonging to a community who believe that Jesus is the Lord. And when you look at the end of John's Gospel and John himself is trying to answer the question, why bother writing a Gospel? Why bother?
Fr Denis McBride:And he answers his own question by saying, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life in his name. That the purpose of the Gospel is not an academic exercise. The purpose of the Gospel is so that people might experience life in his name. And in the first letter of John he argues: So that you too can have fellowship with us as we have fellowship with him. So from the very beginning in the Christian preaching you have a witness of trying to draw people into a community that believes so that eventually that community can stand up and say the creed: We believe.
Fr Denis McBride:That you don't believe alone. That you belong to a community and hopefully that same community can support you in the time of dark when it becomes difficult to believe in anything. That's very important in the Christian tradition that nobody should be thrown back on their own resources because there comes a time in the life of everyone when you don't have any resources anymore. When like the paralytic in the Gospel you are carried by other people. And remember in that story in the Gospel it says: Jesus seeing their faith ministered to him.
Fr Denis McBride:In other words, if you can't believe yourself too deeply, belong to a community that can. And if you're lucky, this community will carry you through the times when you feel hurt or haunted. So from the very beginning, dear friends, you've got a picture of a Christian community that want people to join them in believing that Jesus is the Lord. A Christian community, in other words, of tradition. Now a lot of people don't like this word tradition because they think it means to hold onto the past.
Fr Denis McBride:A lot of people's popular image of tradition is a group of people or somebody holding tight what they've been given. And the origin of the word tradition interestingly enough means the exact opposite of that. Tradition does not mean to hold on to. Tradition literally means the opposite. It means to hand over to other people what you actually believe yourself.
Fr Denis McBride:It's a very lively verb. If you want to lose what you love, you keep it to yourself and it will die with you. Tradition, dear friends, is what people do who don't want to lose what they love. And if you don't want to lose what you love, what do you do? You hand it over to another generation in the hope that that new generation will learn to love what you love and have life in what you have as well.
Fr Denis McBride:Does that make sense? It's a very active, a very outgoing concept. And popularly today it has come to mean almost the opposite. Almost as if we are antique dealers holding on to what is past and polishing it as if we've got nothing to say to the present community except come and look at our antiques. John said the purpose is to hand over life, not to polish antiques.
Fr Denis McBride:But when you you go back to the beginning of your own story, dear friends, we're saying that most people were introduced to Jesus simply because they belonged to a community that loved him. If you think probably of your grandparents and parents, they were the people of tradition, weren't they? They were people who handed over to you what they themselves had life in. And it's interesting to ask yourself dear friends, when you go back to the beginning of your own story, go back to the beginning of your own story of faith and ask yourself the simple question: What were your first images of Jesus? If you can remember as a child.
Fr Denis McBride:And where did you get them from? Who gave them to you? And often these images of Jesus for many people predate the awareness of the Gospel. I'd like to share my own. My both my parents came from a wild place in Ireland, a place called Donegal in the West Coast Of Ireland.
Fr Denis McBride:It is a stunningly beautiful place, filled with mountains and rock, mostly. You can see when you visit there why the British never include it in the political Northern Ireland. It was beautiful but fairly useless by and large. And when you leave Donegal and you drive into the North Of Ireland, it's like it's like driving into another world. Huge, big, tillable fields.
Fr Denis McBride:When you leave Donegal, you leave a land behind you of rocks, untilled and untillable land. My parents met in the middle of the nineteen forties and they married and they wanted to move and they fell in love with the West Coast Of Scotland which geographically is not all that different. So when they left Ireland to move, to make the great move, they brought with them an image of Jesus that was very close to both of them, a kind of rather strange image of Jesus, known to the world as the infant of Prague. Now and now it's just just in case you've forgotten what he looks like. I mean, it's a pretty strange image of an image of the child Jesus dressed to kill.
Fr Denis McBride:We didn't like him as children. I mean, you could tell this kid nothing. He knew absolutely everything and he dominated the world and he also dominated the house, the home of my childhood. He sat on the mantelpiece in the living room. And we were always compared to our discredit with him.
Fr Denis McBride:You know, mum would say, why can't you be more like him? And we would say, well, I mean, frankly, who wants I mean, who wants to look like that? And it's interesting, it's an early sixteenth century, it's not that old, it's early sixteenth century image of Jesus originating in Spain, which is very interesting. They dressed Jesus up as the prince of the royal Spanish household. Sorry, darling.
Fr Denis McBride:Now, it was a very clever move because when you genuflect to him, you genuflect to monarchy. It's a lovely symbol if you're a monarchist for including in your image of Jesus the importance of obedience to monarchy. A Spanish aristocrat married a Bohemian nobleman and she went to live in what today is the Czech Republic and she brought himself with her. And she left it to the convent in Prague. And it was the Carmelites who promoted devotion, that's why he's known as the infant of Prague rather than the infant of Madrid.
Fr Denis McBride:And wherever the Spanish went, they exported this image of Jesus. When I was in The Philippines, I was giving a retreat to the priests in Cebu and they took me to the beautiful cathedral built by the Spanish in Cebu. And at the heart of the cathedral there is this shrine to the Santo Nino, to the holy child. And there he was again. And I said, God, I will never get away from this fellow.
Fr Denis McBride:So he stands on my computer now as an image, my first image of Jesus. My mother had a good sense of humor about religion. She always argued that you had to survive in it. And she told us a story that you may have heard of the time when Jesus dressed up as the infant of Prague in Nazareth and went into Mary and he says, Mama, what do you think? And she looked at him and said, Son, I don't care who your father is, you are not going out dressed like that.
Fr Denis McBride:It's like the story of the American pastor who, after the Vatican Council, he made dramatic changes in the church. And he took all the statues out of the church, all of them, and put them into a statue garden, including the infant of Prague. And a woman came along to argue against what he was doing and she said: Look, Jesus used to be in the middle of the church, now you've moved him to Flat 1A round the corner. She said: You need a metal detector to find the tabernacle. She says: Why have you made all these changes that are confusing people?
Fr Denis McBride:And the pastor said: Now my dear, all the bishops of the church, the whole all the bishops of the church have formally assembled in Rome and they've made these decisions, you know. And not just the bishops but the Holy Spirit, with the bishops, have made these decisions. And she looked up at him and said, she says, Father, why is it the Holy Spirit is making these decisions the Holy Ghost never made? You know, he's still there. When, as children, when we went over to Ireland for holidays, a wonderful space and took to the hills, my grandparents had two pictures in their sitting room.
Fr Denis McBride:One was an image of Jesus and the other one was a picture of John F. Kennedy and his wife from an old calendar, the nearest they could get to Irish saints. And the image that my grandparents had is quite a popular one. An image of the Sacred Heart. And of course if you're four or five years old and you go into your grandparents' house and you look up at this image, it looks a bit strange for a young child, we've got so used to it.
Fr Denis McBride:And you look up at this image of a man looking like he's going through open heart surgery And you say to dad, dad, excuse me, who's that? Hoping he's not a relative. And dad says to you, that's Jesus. And and you kinda wonder, you wonder what happened to him. I mean, things look so good here when he was on top of the world, when he was a kid.
Fr Denis McBride:And you watch this adult man display himself to the world as the suffering one. It's kind of interesting that by and large this image of Jesus is associated with women. Way back in the twelfth century two Benedictine nuns called Gertrude and Mechtild lovely names they had images of Jesus as a suffering man. And for them this was new because remember that the liturgy back then was very clericalized up until comparatively recently. When you went to Mass you went to hear Mass.
Fr Denis McBride:And if you went to one of the big monastic churches, the Mass happened way up the top in a foreign language behind a scream, you know? In other words, it was a very distant Jesus who was in the middle of some kind of clerical huddle. These two women made Jesus available to the popular imagination by saying that Jesus is approachable to everyone for the very simple reason that he is a man who has suffered himself. He's not a stranger to pain and suffering and rejection. And that anyone can go to him in their own troubles and speak because he knows the language of pain and the language of suffering.
Fr Denis McBride:That image of Jesus at the time, dear friends, was a world away from the high liturgical images that the church itself provided. This became very popular for the very simple reason it spoke to people. It was a Jesus who was available to them, a Jesus who was wounded. And often what attracts people about other people, dear friends, is not their power. Often what makes people attractive is their vulnerability.
Fr Denis McBride:And this is an image not of the all powerful Lord, it is an image of the one who has been hurt and can be hurt like yourself, The Approachable One, the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief. The Jesuits who can spot a good thing when they see it Clever men! The Jesuits were the ones who adopted the Sacred Heart and they started building churches to the Sacred Heart long before the Sacred Heart was accepted into the Roman calendar. Another woman, Mother Mary Alacock, also made this image a very popular one, okay? And when, of course, we went to the parish community, in those days when you would go to mass as kids, the mass of course was in Latin.
Fr Denis McBride:You know, and often when you watched adults in those days, adults would bring stuff to mass to help them to get through it. You know, my mother's missile started out, you know, about an inch thick and ended up about three inches thick. And inside the missile she had put stuff that would get her through the Mass. Favorite devotions: Sacred Heart, Infant of Prague, Martin de Porres, St. Jude's Hopeless Cases for the Children.
Fr Denis McBride:And then she would have favorite recipes which was very useful when the homily was very boring. You could check out what you do for next Sunday's lunch. And the parish community often they would come and people would say the rosary and bells had to be rung way up the top to alert people what was going on up there. And as a child suddenly you saw every adult bow their head. And if you're a child and you see every adult bow their head there's one thing that you don't do.
Fr Denis McBride:You don't bow your head. You look up to see what everybody's bowing at. And when you look up you see a priest hold up a white disc and you say to her, Mum, Mum, what's that? And she said, That's Jesus by your head. This is a new one which takes a bit of jumping.
Fr Denis McBride:Your parish community throws another image of Jesus at you. The image of Jesus as the sacred bread in the host. And then, dear friends, when you go to school and you went to the parish in the West Of Scotland, you went to the Catholic parish school and the first thing you learned was your catechism. Who made you? God made me.
Fr Denis McBride:Why did God make you? To know him, to love him, to serve him, and to and I love the last bit, and to be happy with him in the next life. So as a five year old Catholic you knew that happiness was postponed, that if you were lucky it might happen to you in the next life. But in the meantime, you live in this veil of tears. And of course, the first thing you learned in the Catechism about Jesus was that he was number two of a very particular community called the Trinity, the second person of the blessed Trinity.
Fr Denis McBride:Now you didn't know on God's earth what that meant but you knew it was important because if you got it wrong in the Catechism class you had to go out to the front of the class, put out both your hands and you'd be belted. Violence supporting theological clarity. So very quickly you got to learn that he was number two and equal to the others, even though if you went into maths class you would hear a different concept of mathematics that one plus one plus one equals three. But in the religion class one plus one plus one equals one. In other words, you're only five years old.
Fr Denis McBride:And at five years old you have to be a theologian. You've got the infant of Prague, you've got the sacred heart, you've got the host, and you've got number two of the Trinity. And you're keeping them up like a jungler. And in other words, all I'm saying is the community keep offering you images of Jesus in the hope that one of these images might lead you into a relationship with himself. It takes most people a while before they meet the Jesus of the evangelists.
Fr Denis McBride:One who was called by his own contemporaries Yeshua, the Aramaic form of Jesus, that was the name that he would have been called by his own family and by his own followers, the Jesus of the evangelists. And the fascinating thing, dear friends, is when you open the Gospels, Gospels you'll realize that this story is continuing. That the evangelists are going to do what the community has done. The evangelists are going to hand over to you their own images of Jesus. And one of the fascinating things I find in looking at the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and Luke and John is to ask yourself the question, when you open the Gospels, what are the first images that the evangelist hands over to you, the reader?
Fr Denis McBride:And of course they're going to be different. And I suppose one of the reasons why they're going to be different is because the evangelists are going to start the story of Jesus at different places. So if you start the story at a different place, if you start the story of Jesus as a child or if you start the story of Jesus as an adult, obviously your first images of Jesus are going to be different. So what I'd like to look at is to look at the Gospel of Mark. If you open if you've got your Gospels with you, dear friends, if you open your Gospel at the Gospel of Mark and have a look at where Mark begins the story of Jesus.
Fr Denis McBride:Dear friends, if you were asked to go to a tribe that had never heard the story of Jesus at all, didn't know anything about Jesus, and you were sent as the first missionary to that tribe, where would you begin telling the story of Jesus? Because beginnings are kind of important, aren't they? It's like beginning a book or beginning a sermon or beginning a lecture. How do you begin? Where do you start?
Fr Denis McBride:Because the start is obviously an important place. And one of the other things to ask yourself is where would you begin your own story? If you were telling your own story, where would you begin it? Would you begin it with your birth and say, once upon a time I was born when I was very young. And then people would know that we're in for a long story.
Fr Denis McBride:Or would you begin the story in such a way that the first opening you would communicate to the reader who you are? Okay. And one of the things that you would have to decide in telling your own story was what kind of a frame would you put it in. Though, if you've got to tell people a story, but you have to help them by giving them a frame of understanding. In your story, if you told your story, what would be the frame you'd put it into?
Fr Denis McBride:Would it be a tribal story? Would it be a story of your religious order? And say, look, you want to understand me, you've got to understand this bigger story because I fit in there. Would it be a family story? Would it be a political story?
Fr Denis McBride:Would it be a national story? Something about your own people. In other words, you've got to decide apart from telling your new story, what kind of a frame of understanding you're going to put that story in. Okay? Where are you going to go back to in your own story?
Fr Denis McBride:Now, I find this very interesting trying to understand the different frames of the story in the gospel because they're all radically different. If you open the Gospel of Mark, the first voice that you hear is whose voice? The first voice. The first voice you hear goes back to the eighth century BC. Okay?
Fr Denis McBride:It goes back to the prophet Isaiah. Okay? And the prophet Isaiah, you hear Mark quoting now this is very interesting. This is the only single quote from the Old Testament that Mark will ever give you. Okay?
Fr Denis McBride:This is the only quote he ever uses as a narrator of the Gospel. Other people inside his Gospel will quote Scripture. This is the only single time Mark himself is going to quote Scripture as the narrator of the Gospel. So this is kind of key, okay? He sends you back: Luke, I'm going to send my messenger before you.
Fr Denis McBride:He will prepare your way. A voice cries in the wilderness: 'Prepare a way for the Lord. Make his path straight.' In other words, the Jesus story into a much larger story, what we can call the prophetic story. And in the first, in the prologue of Mark's Gospel verses one to 13, you're going to meet three prophets. You first meet the prophet Isaiah and you hear his voice echo from the eighth century BC.
Fr Denis McBride:Then suddenly you're in the present tense. You're in the time of John the Baptist. The eighth century voice said that one day a voice will cry in the wilderness and suddenly Mark, where does he put you? He puts you in the wilderness and suddenly you hear a prophet, a voice proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And Mark opens his Gospel with a scandal.
Fr Denis McBride:All Judea and all Jerusalem are making their way to John. Now does that sound puzzling to people? The most sacred shrine in the whole of Judaism is the temple in the holy city of Jerusalem, a temple that is organised by the priests. And now you've got people leaving the holy city and leaving the temple and going out into the wilderness to hear the word of God spoken. Mark's Gospel opens with a dramatic shift where people are voting with their feet.
Fr Denis McBride:Dear friends, people will go where the Word of God is spoken, they believe they can hear this Word. And if the Word of God is not spoken or they don't hear it in the sacred place, they'll go somewhere else if they're hungry or they will not go at all. So you have this dramatic shift. I mean, friends, can you imagine yourself as the parish priest in the temple? And you can come out and you say, God help us, where's everyone gone?
Fr Denis McBride:And Anna, who's still hanging around the temple, says they've all gone out to hear John the Baptist. How do you feel? You've just seen your collection go for a walk. You've just seen people make a judgment about you that if I want to hear the word of God I'm going somewhere else. And they're going out from sacred space into non sacred space.
Fr Denis McBride:John the Baptist does not operate in sacred space. He operates in ordinary space. And he's clearly a charismatic character who's got the capacity to attract people where people would never normally go. You don't organize a day's outing into the wilderness. There's nothing to see except stones.
Fr Denis McBride:There's no point in saying to people, I'm going out for a day shopping into the wilderness. All you will see is rocks. But there is somebody there, Marx says, who's attracting all these people. And the other scandal is, and they when they go out there, they confess their sins to him. Does that not sound strange that you would leave the temple controlled by priests and go out into the desert and confess your sins to a layman?
Fr Denis McBride:See, we've read this so often we forget the scandal of it. Sacred space is being left behind. Religion is moving out of sacred space into ordinary space. It's making itself available to all people. Like John the Baptist is, making himself available to all people.
Fr Denis McBride:And John the Baptist is portrayed you get an insight into his wardrobe and his diet. It looks like a portrait of early punk going around wearing camel skin and a leather belt in some of the versions. And there he is and if you go to lunch with John the Baptist, it's locusts. You know, most people eat sandwiches when they go out and you've got this image of a man, a wild man crunching locusts in the wilderness. A man who's at home in the wilderness when nobody else would be at home if they came from Jerusalem.
Fr Denis McBride:And he's a preacher, he's a prophet, he proclaims things, and he proclaims that somebody, and this person is unidentified. He doesn't say who it is. And when Jesus comes he does not recognise him either. Jesus is unrecognised by John the Baptist in the earliest Gospel. That's going to get changed by the time the later Gospels are written.
Fr Denis McBride:He simply says, Someone is following me. And then Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and is baptized, Mark begins his Gospel with an adult Jesus. And his first image of Jesus in a sense is a very simple one. Jesus is an adult layman. Later on Mark will describe him as a carpenter.
Fr Denis McBride:Matthew, who's a wee bit of a snob, says that he's the son of a carpenter. Mark says he's a carpenter. And Mark says, if you want to know where the Jesus story begins, it begins when Jesus leaves home. And he goes down south and he meets a wild man in the desert and that after his time with John the Baptist in the desert Jesus will change his life. He will make an option that will take him away from his past life and project him into the tradition of the prophetic life.
Fr Denis McBride:Now it's a very interesting place to begin the story of Jesus as an adult. A lot of people's stories only really begin when they leave home. Some people's stories only really begin when they meet someone and that someone has got the capacity to turn their life around and give them a new sense of themselves. When we were kids, my father would say to us as children, he would say, be nice to your mother. And then he would say, My life started when I met her.
Fr Denis McBride:And we didn't understand that for years. We say, Is life started? I mean, what, were they twins? Dear friends, some people's life only starts when they meet somebody. You can think of other people in the Christian tradition who tell that story.
Fr Denis McBride:When does Paul say his life started? On the road to Damascus in one Corinthians 15 when Paul is talking about it, he says, I was born, I knew, that's when I was born. And he dismisses his life before that time, and this is his own phrase, as so much rubbish from Philippians. He dates the beginning of his real life from the time he met the Christ on the road to Damascus. That's what I mean when I say, where would you begin your own story?
Fr Denis McBride:Given who you are today, what was the defining moment that started you on the journey that explains who you are today? Where does that journey start? Does that journey start at your birth? Or did it start much later? You know what I mean?
Fr Denis McBride:I mean, given who you are today, where does that story start? Where would you put the beginning of that story? You know, it's like people ask you sometimes, you know, God, why did you marry him? Or why did you become a sister or a brother or a priest? When did it start?
Fr Denis McBride:And often people aren't they, they're looking for a story aren't they? To try to account for who you are today. And Mark says that's where the story of Jesus actually begins. And Jesus is going to begin his prophetic vocation and after his baptism what happens to him? He's impelled into the wilderness.
Fr Denis McBride:And into the wilderness he will be there for forty days, reminiscent of the great forty years. He's with the wild beasts, and the angels look after him. And then Mark begins the public ministry of Jesus when Jesus starts taking charge of His new life. He goes up into Galilee and he starts to preach. Okay?
Fr Denis McBride:And the image of Jesus which Mark will use in the public ministry is the image of the suffering Son of Man. When Jesus ever talks about himself in Mark's Gospel, which is rare, he will talk about himself through the image of the one who must suffer and must be rejected. Mark's Gospel is the great Gospel for suffering people. How do you find dignity in suffering? How do you find purpose in suffering?
Fr Denis McBride:Can you see a point when not only you suffer but you are rejected by your own people, by your own crowd? One of the great realizations Mark has in his Gospel is that Jesus of Nazareth by and large was rejected by his own contemporaries. That the Jewish people by and large do not accept the Christian claims of the apostolic community. That Imperial Rome has destroyed the greatest shrine of Judaism in the temple and that now Imperial Rome is now prosecuting the followers of Jesus. Those are four great stories of rejection happening by the year '70.
Fr Denis McBride:And Mark is writing a Gospel in the knowledge of that. How can you find dignity in the midst of your own pain? And that's why his great image of Jesus is the suffering son of man.
Presenter:While listening to these recordings, you might want to have the book Jesus and the Gospels beside you. You can order your copy at www.rpbooks.co.uk or find the e book for your smart device. Thank you for joining Redemptorist Publications with Jesus and the Gospels.