A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Epiphany 5B and Last
The text: Mark 1:40-9:1
As we prepare for the final week after Epiphany and ready ourselves for Lent, the lectionary will shift to focus on themes rather than progress through the story. Which means we won’t pick this narrative arc up again until the Second Sunday After Pentecost, which is months from now.
In the meantime, we are completing this season with a trip up the mountain for the Transfiguration.
Epiphany’s themes of light, revealing, and presence have been present in stories of baptism and the calling of the disciples, in the healings and finally, in the transfiguration of Jesus.
What we’re likely to not have on our radar, however, is all that the disciples learn. About Jesus and the mission. And their own place in the Kin-dom.
The Transfiguration itself happens in the midst of a context. In the midst of Jesus’s turning toward Jerusalem, and in revealing that he is destined to die there. But that his death will not be his end.
And it happens in the midst of the disciples’ epic confusion of what all of this means. About the roles they are to play and what this Way of Love implies for their lives.
In short, this epic event on the mountaintop is saturated with the disciples’ confusion. And this is emblematic of what happens after they start walking down the mountain. The other disciples can no longer heal on command.They had the ability just days ago. Now, they can’t.
This sudden draining of ability has come as their hearts are being filled with confusion and fear. At the expanding of the mission, the shape of the Kin-dom, and certainly all that talk of living and dying and rising and ascending. All events that the lectionary jumps over to get us here in advance of Lent.
They are scared and confused. And who can blame them? There is genuine existential fear and Jesus keeps going about his business; and with renewed gusto.
Perhaps we’re feeling the same thing.