Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B, Volume 3
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
“Jesus, at least in this pericope, risks ambiguity, metaphor, and ‘thick’ communication. He is not trying to obfuscate the truth but rather to reveal a difficult, counterintuitive, countercultural truth. ‘Faith,’ as the word is used here, means more than clarity about the facts, belief in a set of propositions. Faith means encounter with a person, one who is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’ (14:6). The one who speaks to us in this peculiarly metaphorical way is the one who desires not only that we think about him but that we feed on him, ingest him, implying that we could starve to death without him.” (Pages 311–313)
“The imagery of passivity combined with fantastic and disproportionate growth makes me think about grace.” (Pages 140–142)
“The notable parallels deepen the meaning of the stories. Both victims of illness are female and ritually unclean, one as a result of death and one as a result of hemorrhage; both represent the significance of the number twelve in Jewish tradition (the twelve years of hemorrhage and the twelve-year-old girl); and both are regarded as ‘daughters’ (the little girl being Jairus’s daughter and the woman who is addressed by Jesus as ‘Daughter’). An act of touch restores both women to new life even as those surrounding them lack understanding.” (Page 191)
“Alas, their faith is in their idea of a Savior. By rejecting their attempt to make him king, Jesus is critiquing and rearranging their idea of reign, just as he has attempted to reframe and redefine their notions of temple, birth, water, and life.” (Page 311)
- Title: Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B, Volume 3
- 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:FEASTWORDB03
- Resource Type: Bible Commentary
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-12T08:21:39Z