Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
If gentiles are now coming to faith in Jesus, and many Jews are not, has the word of God and his promise to Israel failed? That is the critical question Paul starts to address in Roman 9.1–5, the epistle for Trinity 9 in Year A. This passage cannot be read in isolation, as Paul uses …
The gospel reading for Trinity 3 in Year A is Matthew 10.24–39—we continue to work through Jesus’ teaching on mission in Matthew 10, but the lectionary has jumped across from the specifics of his sending out the Twelve (last week in Matthew 9.35–10.8) to more general teaching about being faithful under pressure. (You can find …
The lectionary gospel readers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter take the three parts of John 10 in turn; being in Year A, we are reading the first ten verses. You can watch the video discussion of the passage here, and it is linked below. The epistle is 1 Peter 2.19–25, a challenge passage both …
When I first learnt New Testament Greek, the set text for our class was (slightly oddly!) 1 Peter. This has left me with an affection for the letter—so I was very interested to see the new commentary on the letter by Sean du Toit in the New Covenant Commentary Series. I had the chance to …
The lectionary epistle for Trinity 17 in Year C is 2 Timothy 2.8–15. Paul continues with the theme of ‘remembering’, characteristically interweaving God’s powerful initiative and the need for our response. The passage has connections with Jesus’ teaching in the gospels and (of course) with the Book of Revelation. Sadly, James does not sing for …
Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury is truly unprecedented. No archbishop has ever, in the history of the Church of England, resigned—not even in 1621 when the primate of all England shot and killed a gamekeeper with a crossbow while hunting. It has felt like a very strange week; when I think back to …
The letters of John form a remarkable collection of writing, usually place towards the end of the New Testament. The imagery is powerful; the language is engaging; and the teaching is immensely practical. I can still remember the impact of studying these letters in a small group not long after I came to faith as …
The Sunday lectionary gospel reading for Trinity 18 in this Year B is Mark 9.38–50. It is a rather unusual reading; it completes the collection of sayings that we began last week, and there is some continuity across the two passages; and it does belong (as we noted last week) to a section of teachings …
The Sunday lectionary gospel reading for Trinity 18 in this Year B is Mark 9.38–50. It is a rather unusual reading; it completes the collection of sayings that we began last week, and there is some continuity across the two passages; and it does belong (as we noted last week) to a section of teachings …
The lectionary gospel readers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter take the three parts of John 10 in turn; in Year A, we read the first ten verses, and now in Year B we look at the second section in John 10.11–18. But this is a good example of where our modern chapter divisions (first …
The gospel lectionary reading for Year B is the second part of John 10 (John 10.11-18) on the theme of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, following on from the first part explored in Year A. This passage needs to be read carefully in the context of this section of the gospel—but also in its first …
