Come and see
The first thing Christ says to anybody in John’s Gospel is a question, and it is not the one you would expect. He answers a question about an address with an afternoon.
They are taken from across the volume rather than the front of it, so you can see the range: the invitation, the rest offered to the weary, a parable quoted whole, the mercy that goes looking, and the question the whole book has been walking toward.
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My yoke is easy
Come to Me, all you who are weary. What He offers is rest — and a yoke, in the same breath.
The sower
A parable printed whole, never cut before the ending. Four kinds of ground, and only one of them is about failure of the seed.
The lost sheep
Ninety-nine left in the open to go after one. Terrible management, or the entire point.
Who do you say that I am?
The last week of the volume. The question that cannot be answered from a distance, and for which nobody else’s answer will do.
That is five of a hundred and fifty-six
Book One runs from come and see to who do you say that I am?, and two more volumes follow it. Every royalty goes toward building a church for a mission that has none.