Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B, Volume 4
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
“Finally, Jesus talked about the salt of the disciples, the qualities that would preserve and enhance their community. From all that Jesus said as he journeyed the way to Jerusalem with his disciples, it becomes clear that their saltiness involves being humble in their relationships with each other, giving of themselves for others, reaching out and accepting all the people around them. They are to ‘be at peace with one another.’” (Page 120)
“Jesus does not answer the disciples’ question directly. Instead, he sets out for them a way to live that does not focus all of their attention on the destruction of the temple or the second coming.” (Page 310)
“As usual, Jesus reframes the debate. He turns the question from the grounds for divorce to the grounds for marriage.” (Page 142)
“Sometimes these words are read as a threat or warning from Jesus: ‘James and John, you too will be crucified.’ However, in the larger context of the story, Jesus’ words may also be read as an extraordinary promise: ‘You will not always be driven by your fears and your need for security. Rather, you will be empowered to take up your cross and follow me. You will be faithful disciples even to the end.’ Here is the great promise for the church. We need not always live in fear; we need not continually seek our own security. Rather, we have Jesus’ promise that we can and will live as faithful disciples as we seek to follow him. It is an extraordinary promise made to such a fumbling, bumbling group of disciples—then and now!” (Pages 191–193)
“The Bartimaeus story serves as the concluding bookend to a section of Mark’s Gospel in which blindness serves as a unifying theme. The section begins in 8:22–26 with a story in which Jesus struggles to restore sight to a blind man at Bethsaida. In chapters 9 and 10 Jesus confronts a different kind of blindness—a spiritual blindness among his closest followers, who seem either unwilling or unable to accept the radical, subversive claims of God’s inbreaking kingdom.” (Page 212)
- Title: Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B, Volume 4
- 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:FEASTWORDB04
- Resource Type: Bible Commentary
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-12T08:21:40Z