Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C, Volume 2
Overview
With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox Press offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. The twelve volumes of this series cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints’ Day. For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays—one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclamation of the Word on any given occasion. The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that non-lectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.
Top Highlights
“Luke wants to make sure we get the message. The God who created the world and raised Jesus from the dead is still active in the world, bringing healing to the diseased, hope to those in despair, and life where death seems to reign.” (Page 426)
“The main character in this and every conversion story is God. It is God who changes lives. The one thing clear about Saul’s Damascus Road experience is the power of God that turned him from someone ‘breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ (9:1) to someone who ‘proclaimed Jesus’ so that ‘all who heard him were amazed’ (vv. 20–21). Saul’s conversion was not something he decided to do on his own. It was God’s doing.” (Page 404)
“These are not ‘temptations’ to do things that are desirable but not good for him (like our ‘temptation’ to eat an extra piece of cake). Rather, these are tests to see whether even good things can lure Jesus from a focus on God’s will—or can lure believers into following a more comfortable messiah.” (Page 47)
“What kind of king? So we have a clash of kingdoms: Caesar or Christ. Caesar’s kingdom is based on domination and ruthless power, the kind of kingship Jesus refused when tempted in the wilderness. The kingdom of God Jesus preached is based on justice, mercy, and the love of God (Luke 11:42 and Matt. 23:23). So we have our choice: Pax Christi or Pax Romana. Our challenge is to show how the gospel of the kingdom has political implications but transcends our everyday political loyalties.” (Page 155)
“Luke places the lament over Jerusalem at the end of a collection of parables (13:1–30), all of which are calls for repentance. This is very likely a key to how Luke understands its significance. Jesus’ lament over the city of Jerusalem is less a final judgment on the city and more a call to repentance. The touching metaphor by which Jesus asserts that it is God’s will to protect Jerusalem through him is evidence that Jesus is predicting not the city’s destruction but its salvation.” (Pages 71–73)
- Title: Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C, Volume 2
- Authors: David L. Bartlett, Barbara Brown Taylor
- Series: Feasting on the Word
- Publisher: Westminster John Knox
- Print Publication Date: 2009
- Logos Release Date: 2013
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Common lectionary (1992); Lectionary preaching
- Resource ID: LLS:FEASTWORDC02
- Resource Type: Bible Commentary
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-12T08:21:42Z