Big Bits of Audible Bread

I’ve just started reading N. T. Wright’s Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship (London, SPCK, 1994)

Part One, “Looking to Jesus”, gives “a kind of aerial photograph or bird’s-eye view” of six different New Testament books. Wright says: “To change the image, I have supplied a kind of programme note for each book, so that, as with a symphony, one can listen out for the main themes.”

The chapters are:

(1) The Final Sacrifice: Hebrews

(2) The Battle Won: Colossians

(3) The Kingdom of the Son of Man: Matthew

(4) The Glory of God: John

(5) The Servant King: Mark

(6) A World Reborn: Revelation

These invitations to whole books of the Bible may well prove helpful. Given the way we often push reading notes or daily Bible reading schemes, its worth thinking about Wright’s comment that:

People do not always, perhaps, realize how natural and easy reading whole books
of the Bible can be, You can read through Colossians quite slowly in about
twelve minutes; you can get through Hebrews in under and hour…. I am convinced
that using a lectionary - reading the Bible in little snippets - is a second
order activity; the primary activity ought to be reading the Bible in large
chunks, to get its full flavour and thrust. (p. x)

He adds,

Many of the sermons – all those in the first Part, and chapters 9 and 10 in the second – were preached in the context of the Eucharist, and some of the eucharistic references remain. This, I am again persuaded, is no bad thing. The visible word and the written word – or if you like, the edible bread and the audible bread – go closely together, as they did for the two on the Emmaus Road in Luke 24. Following Jesus, after all, involves heart, mind, soul and strength. A church without sermons will soon have a shrivelled mind, then a wayward heart, next an unquiet soul, and finally a misdirected strength. A church without the sacraments will find its strength cut off, its soul undernourished, its heart prey to conflicting emotions, and its mind engaged in increasingly irrelevant intellectual games…. if these pieces suggest ways in which word and sacrament can be held firmly together, supplying together the context and energy to enable us to follow Jesus, I shall be delighted. (p. xf)

For the record: “The second half of the book ranges more widely over various topics which together inform, and set the context of, the biblical model of discipleship.”:

Part II: A Living Sacrifice

(7) The God Who Raises the Dead

(8) The Mind Renewed

(9) Temptation

(10) Hell

(11) Heaven and Power

(12) New Life – New World