A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between
The text: Mark 11:1-12:27 or John 11:1-31
The lectionary was written to match certain patterns of the church year. We begin with Advent, then we celebrate Christmas: the Feast of the Incarnation. Then we have a Christmas season before Epiphany and the season after that. We come to Lent, which prepares us for Holy Week and its events, Easter, and the Easter season, and finally, Pentecost. These seasons have themes and stories that the lectionary makes sure to cover during this time.
The rest of the year, which is about half of the calendar, is called Ordinary Time, and we spend it going through the gospel story, more or less, in order, learning about the life and teachings of Jesus.
This pattern is great for highlighting the parts of the gospel that the church considers essential. But it does so at the expense of context. We don’t go through a gospel in order throughout the year. And we also pull the essential bits out of their context, which can cultivate misunderstanding.
This week, we encounter one of those seems in the fabric.
Last week, the disciples were approaching Jerusalem, anticipating the confrontation to come.
But we don’t read about that here. We won’t read about that for another six months.
Nor will we read about the “cleansing of the Temple”.
We skip over the interrogations and teachings of Jesus that follow, the contents of about a chapter and a half of Mark. So we get a disembodied teaching here, one that silences the crowd in Jerusalem and cements his position as dead man walking. But we receive it like a good, everyday lesson.
I don’t mean to be glib, exactly. But I worry that many people of faith are already too prone to see the Bible as an answer book and look at the teachings of Jesus as laws for living rather than a living story that brings us closer to God.
This week’s gospel has a universal quality to it.
Which isn’t bad at all. And, given the context, may be the only teaching of Jesus that has almost equal value out of context as in. However, it is important to know who he is offering it to and why. That he is just outside the Temple where rabbis offer teaching, where has been confronted and interrogated by religious leaders. And this test is one that Jesus offers both a novel and honest teaching that even his skeptics have to acknowledge is sound.
The beauty of this, too, is in recognizing that his skeptics don’t acknowledge other sound teachings, either. They just get quiet. Or play dumb. Here, though, it is heard.
What if we do All Saints on Sunday?
Then obviously you miss this important teaching. And you get to read a passage from John that we deal with at a different time in the lectionary: The death and resurrection of Lazarus.
This shorter version of the story deals only with the point after Jesus arrives to find Lazarus has already died. We miss the sending word of Lazarus being near death and of the disciples discouraging Jesus from going back to Judaea.
We also miss the great conversation about death and resurrection with Mary and her calling to Martha to come see Jesus.
The Martha Insertion Theory
There is interesting work being done now around this story, noting that that all of the earliest versions of the manuscripts for John 11 have scribal edits that seem to insert Martha into the story, going back to the third and fourth centuries. Edits which make this moment resonate a bit with the passage from Luke about Mary and Martha entertaining Jesus at their home.
What was missing from that story was any mention of Lazarus, who now is not only a brother, but a man who seems to be Jesus’s best friend. New scholarship seems to suggest that this story was originally about two siblings: Mary and Lazarus. And there is reason to suggest that this Mary is Mary Magdalene—the one person who seems to be able to speak to Jesus with such familiarity.
How we approach the gospel as we have it—with Martha getting mad at Jesus for not saving her brother, only to witness Jesus bring him back—is up to us. Knowing the background is always helpful. And knowing that that this is the last story in John before they enter Jerusalem (as last week’s story was the same for Mark) offers a kind of mulligan for the congregation as we put off skipping ahead until next week.