Jn 19:41 – ‘At the place where Jesus was crucified there was a garden.’

In ‘Preaching and Preachers’ D.M. Lloyd-Jones mentions ‘a certain famous preacher’ who used v41 as the text for a sermon on ‘Turning the place of your crucifixion into a garden’.  The message was about how people suffering from illnesses could and should react to their trial.

‘He told us that good people who took it in a beautiful spirit, and never grumbled and never complained, turned their place of crucifixion into a garden.’

But, of course, there is nothing in the text about ‘turning’ a place of crucifixion into a garden.  There is no connection  whatsover between text and message.

(I have the temerity to add that Lloyd-Jones himself was not exempt from seeing things in the text that were not there.  But that is a matter for other episodes of this series of posts.)