The mother of one of my good friends died at the end of September. I had visited with them in April. Her death was unexpected, but it was a release from the suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In that sense, it was a blessing that many of us have prayed for when someone in own our families has had this terrible disease.

In the post-World War II period many things changed in America. For those of us of a certain age, that time was intense and unforgettable. One of the marks of those postwar decades was a yearning for authenticity. This yearning was a significant element of the literature and cinema of the period. J. D. Salinger was a kind of prophet of the authentic life: his Holden Caulfield condemned phoniness; his Franny, appalled by the bourgeois values of the Ivy League, retreated to her parents’ spacious apartment to recite the Jesus Prayer and remain unstained by everything that was false and fake. In Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Benjamin, a recent college graduate, played by the young Dustin Hoffman, returns home to Pasadena, lost and confused about his future. And, as we discover, he can’t turn to his parents or their friends for guidance. In The Graduate, the older generation is clueless, hopelessly corrupt, hypocritical and, of course, inauthentic.

Today is the fourth Sunday when our gospel lesson is taken from Matthew’s account of the days between Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his betrayal. While preparing a sermon two Sundays ago, I noticed that Matthew and Luke’s narratives of Jesus’ entry and of his last days in Jerusalem begin differently from Mark’s.

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,[1] the narrative is dark from its beginning. When Tess returns home unmarried and with child—well, it’s a sad English novel.

A king has a son who is getting married, and he invites people to the banquet. He sends out his slaves, presumably on the day of the wedding, to remind them that they were invited, but no one comes.  He sends out the slaves again to entice them to attend by sharing the menu with them. The food is already prepared, come and eat. No one comes. Not only do they not come, but they mistreat and kill the king’s slaves. He responds by killing everyone who had been invited and destroying their city. Presumably their city is his city and refers to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. So, the king has wiped out what we can assume were the leading citizens of his kingdom and pulled his city down around him.

Let me begin by reminding you and me that starting last Sunday, our gospel lessons until Advent are taken from Matthew’s narrative of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, the days between his triumphal entry and his betrayal. Today, as it were, is Jesus’ second day in Jerusalem.

In the gospel lesson for last Sunday, Jesus and his disciples were in Judea, beginning to make their way to Jerusalem. For today, and for the next eight Sundays of this church year, they are already in Jerusalem. In today’s lesson Jesus is teaching in the temple.

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.