In Matthew, Jesus gives five sermons.[1] The most famous is the first and longest, the Sermon on the Mount.[2] It begins with these words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[3] The second is the Mission Sermon. In it Jesus gives his twelve disciples the authority to do what he has been doing: casting out unclean spirits and healing the sick.[4]

While on a visit to Georgia last month, I had a day to do some work on family genealogy. I ended up in the county where my mother’s mother was born, Twiggs County. It’s in the geographic center of Georgia—a very rural area. The original county courthouse survived the Civil War, but it burned in 1901. Very, very few of its records survived the fire.

Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John all share the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.[1] Mark, Matthew, and John, but not Luke, follow this story with the account of Jesus walking on the sea.[2] No one is really sure why Luke omitted it. Scholars call the omission of this and other passages in Mark that Matthew included, “the great omission.”[3] And I’ll leave it at that.

Let me begin by reminding me and you that, despite the story of King Solomon asking for a sword to be brought when two women came before him with one infant child, each claiming the child as her own, and despite his building of the temple and his great wealth, not only was Solomon not wise, but he was unfaithful. In the First Book of the Kings we read that he had seven hundred wives, who were princesses, and three hundred concubines.[1] And the wives are blamed, of course, for seducing him away from the Lord: “Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.”[2] He notoriously oppressed his people, and when his son proclaimed he would follow in his father’s footsteps, he lost all of the kingdom except Judah and Jerusalem.[3] If our first lesson were picked because of its relationship to the gospel lesson, I am mystified by the attempt to link Jesus with Solomon. For with Matthew’s Jesus, to obey God is what life and eternal life are all about.

Today’s gospel lesson comes from a section of Matthew where Jesus’ words and deeds have been “largely rejected”[1] by the people he has encountered. You and I know that the rejection of Jesus will continue and will grow all the way to Calvary. But in the middle of this story of rejection, Matthew’s Jesus has words of hope and comfort for those who persevere in faith.

In Matthew, when Jesus finished the Sermon on the Mount, the longest and best known of the five sermons Matthew’s Jesus gives, the evangelist tells us that Jesus “went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity.”[1]

“Call and Response” is the name given to a form of preaching, of rhetoric, that belongs to the African-American Christian community. Its dialogue engages the preacher and the congregation; they move each other along.[1] That’s one way also to understand John’s gospel. The Word made flesh is calling; men and women are responding. And God is looking for one response: belief in his Son Jesus Christ.

When I was rector of a parish with teenagers, I often found myself saying to one or more of them, “I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve read the book.” Well, right now, I’m reading a book because I saw an episode of the BBC television production of Hillary Mantel’s 2009 novel Wolf Hall.[1] I’ve had a copy of it for quite a while. It got such good reviews when it was published. Historical fiction. It’s based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, who would become the minister of Henry VIII who oversaw, among other things, the king’s divorce from Queen Katharine, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, and Anne’s beheading.

For the last Sunday of the Easter Season, the appointed gospel from John takes us back to the supper before the Passover. That night, Jesus knows that he is going away, and he knows that he’s going to return. He shares this news with those he will for the first time that very night call “friends.”[1] Jesus also knows that he is going to die, but he does not speak of it directly.

Humankind’s relationship with God comes from God. Humankind’s awareness of God’s relationship to humankind changes with Jesus Christ. When the Word became flesh, humans were revealed to be, like Jesus, children of God.

What we know as the tenth chapter of John stands between Jesus’ healing of the man born blind—chapter nine—and the raising of Lazarus from the dead—chapter eleven.

The disciples whom the Risen Jesus met on the road to Emmaus—perhaps a man and a woman[1]—know all about Jesus, but—and I’m not sure how to understand this—“their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”[2] Dr. Mark Davis translates the Greek here as, “their eyes were held from him so not to recognize him.”[3] (An echo of the Exodus where repeatedly Pharaoh’s heart is hardened so God can perform the miracle that he wants to perform?[4]) (By the way, the title Davis gives to his comments is, “Two Idiots and a Lord Walk into an Inn.”)

Two important words that accompany the different accounts of the resurrection are fear and joy. In Mark’s gospel there was only fear when the women left the tomb. In Matthew there was fear and great joy. In Luke fear and joy. And in John, fear and joy—for everyone except Thomas. John the evangelist narrates the story in a way that covers a lot of what we would call theology.

At the supper before the Passover, Jesus told his disciples, his friends, that he was going away and that in “a little while . . . you will see me.”[1] Yet nothing Jesus did or said prepared his friends for the reality of his death, and nothing Jesus did or said prepared his friends for the reality of his risen life. Peter and the unnamed disciple whom we know only as the disciple Jesus loved left Jesus’ grave when they found it open and seemingly empty except for some cloths. They did not understand what they had seen; so they left.

The historic gospel reading for this Eucharist is from the very beginning of John’s account of the supper before the Passover, what we call John chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. These five chapters are together the longest narrative by far in any of the gospels—and tonight we heard only the first fifteen verses of the account.