The Master Preacher: Sermons from John
by Roy Sheldon MacKenzie
Fairway Press, Lima, Ohio, 2006
In his introduction to The Master Preacher, short and not to be skipped over, Rev. Sheldon MacKenzie's opening paragraph reads: “The Gospel of John is distinctly different from the other three. To begin with, it is written in language that is deceptively simple. A child may read and enjoy it. At the same time, while a mature adult may read it easily, he/she may understand it with difficulty.”
That mixture of clarity and depth is echoed in the sermons that follow. He eschews polysyllabic words like “eschew” and “polysyllabic,” using a simple and direct vocabulary that nonetheless betrays years of New Testament scholarship and teaching. His intimate knowledge of the Greek text and the work of other scholarcommentators never intrude in a disruptive or obvious way. He is addressing the elusive ordinary worshipper/reader, not academic colleagues, yet the former are not cheated or condescended to, nor will the latter be disappointed, whether or not they agree, as academics oft find it difficult to do. He incorporates his scholarship in ways that challenge and expand stale readings of the text, but never in an in-your-face divisive way. Two examples that come immediately to mind are the way MacKenzie points to and explores John's use of sign (miracle) throughout his Gospel and the humanity/divinity of Christ as John saw this perpetual question of theological balance (Christology).
Six of the 25 sermons are devoted to what might be called the more theological/philosophical passages in John. The first three are based on the lyrically beautiful, deceptively simple prologue to John's Gospel. MacKenzie acknowledges that “as John Calvin taught, there are limits to what we are able to learn of God from the birth of the Messiah. These are the limits of human nature. Both His and ours. We can be taught only to the limits of our nature. When the Word of God was clothed in Bethlehem with humanity, it was clothed with our limitations.” He goes on to use John to reclaim Christmas from the amalgamated cast of dozens at popular crèches and Christmas pageants, to restore it to its essential purity and significance.
Another three sermons come from the “Farewell Discourses” (specifically John 15, 16 and 17), Jesus' long good-bye to his disciples, which John employs for distinctively doctrinal purposes. Mackenzie, without diluting their significance in giving the Church an understanding of how to think of our Lord, adds an unforced, natural, and totally believable human touch, re-emphasizing or even restoring the conversational appeal of the “between friends” instruction.
That human element is predominant in all the sermons, drawn from incidents of human contact and/or conflict in the narrative. It is in these sermons particularly that MacKenzie draws on a long life as pastor and teacher. His anecdotes and illustrations are memorable: one of a young Newfoundland boy fed up with seeing Santy in a mall at Christmas is priceless. A couple of other lines, among many, provide a taste of his powers of description. “The faces of the men in religious authority were grim. They looked like undertakers in a town where no one dies.”
Five of the sermons come from John 9, the story of the man born blind and the hullabaloo of nastiness after he had his sight given him by Jesus. I confess that at first I was a little fatigued with such a concentration, anxious to get on with fresh settings. It is only by reading them through that, at the end, you see why MacKenzie has spent so much time and space on the story, perhaps itself originally a sermon! The incident is central to the Gospel, and, with the raising of Lazarus, Loose Him And Let Him Go, (sermon 17) the key to John's perspective. MacKenzie supplies both an appendix and an outline to assist the reader in working through the ninth chapter, as well as a very useful basic bibliography to the entire book. I might also defer, if only a little, from a point or two in the sermons on the paralytic by the Sheep-Pool in Jerusalem from John 5 (Do We Really Want To Get Well?) and the orphan in chapter eight, the woman taken in adultery (A Conscience Or A Stone?). But MacKenzie himself, in footnotes here and there — mercifully few — points to other helpful understandings.
The only other criticism, and it is minor, that I have to offer is that in successive sermons he proposes that the date of John's Gospel was written 65 and 70 years, respectively, after the Resurrection. We could average the discrepancy out, if it is that important to us, to 67.5, i.e., May 67 CE, but that would be unnecessarily splitting hairs.
People tend to buy collections of sermons because they know the preacher personally, or need a suitable gift for some young person on whom they want to project piety, or for someone for whom pious is both an advertised attitude and a barrier to normal gift-giving. I confess to the first category, but urge those who read this review to expand or abandon the last two. This book will deepen the spiritual and intellectual understanding of any serious Christian, without anesthetic.
