Peter Costello
The Four Gospels: Following in the Footsteps of Jesus
by Maurice Hogan SSC (Veritas, €14.99)
This interesting book on the four Gospels seems to have grown directly out of the author’s own experiences.
Fr Maurice Hogan is a Columban Father. After he was ordained, back in 1965, he went out to the Far East, working first in Japan and then in Hong Kong. Returning to Ireland, he was appointed Professor of Sacred Scripture at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He was also for a decade a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
At the present moment he is the Director of World Missions Ireland, which aims to provide practical and spiritual worldwide support for missionary societies. So in his life propagating and teaching the scriptures have had a central role.
He is the author of an earlier book, Seeking Jesus of Nazareth (Columba Press, 2001) and, with James McEvoy, The Mystery of Faith (Columba Press 2005). The intentions of those books come together in this one. In his new book he wants to provide his readers with a personal way into, not just the matter of the four Gospels, but the heart of the Gospels as well.
I think it can be said that for most people the Gospels are what they hear in the daily Mass reading, or perhaps only the Sunday reading. That is to say, selected passages that suit the feast of the day.
But reading the Gospels as whole can be a different and more difficult task. Are they to be read as history, which is problematical, for the authors take so much that would have been known to their original audiences for granted? Are they to be reread as biography? Given the fragmentary way that the life of Jesus is recorded in them, that poses problems too.
Fr Hogan offers something different. He suggests that each Gospel can be seen to have its own major theme. In Mark, he suggests it is the nature of Christ; in Matthew it is the nature of the Church, Luke and Acts are missionary, and John (the authors of which were strongly influenced by Greek philosophy) it is the nature of spirituality, the deepest depths of faith.
Now it will be seen that these elements appeal to different personalities, it seems to me, allowing readers to explore the nature of faith through the nature of the Gospels. But the ultimate appeal of the texts provides for very different temperaments and experiences, as with the author himself.
Readers can take from the Gospels what will sustain them personally, or their state of life, their exact involvement, whether active and outgoing, or internal and spiritual.
But Maurice Hogan leads on to the idea that with a fully internalised faith based on the Gospels his readers will be better able to share that faith, not perhaps as he did through a mission abroad, but through their everyday life.
What is revealed through this suggested way of reading the Gospels are different aspects of Jesus himself. This is important as it emphasises that though Jesus is “the way, the truth, and life”, that way can follow many paths.
The pious or the liturgically minded often assume that their particular approach to faith is the only one. But this is not the case. The apostle Paul (in Corinthians 9:19-23, an important passage worth pondering deeply) counsels Christians to be “all things to all men”.
Which is, I suppose, another way of saying that in the Christian message in the Gospels there is something for everyone. There is a personal Jesus to suit everyone.