A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Proper 27B + 28B
The text: Mark 12
Two weeks ago, the lectionary jumped into the Jerusalem experience, plopping us all into the latest moments of Jesus’s confrontation with the Temple. It is a disembodying experience for us as readers of the narrative to be without all of that gravity, without experiencing this part of the story, and relying on our own situational awareness to put that into the background of our minds.
As we enter into these last moments in Jerusalem as rabbi, prophet, and messiah before the Passion, we must see the confusion to come with the knowing minds of witnesses who have seen Jesus teach his disciples and watched their misunderstanding, who know what is happening here while his closest followers are stuck on their wrong ideas. Ideas about how messiahs ought to behave. Ideas about how communities ought to see God’s work in their midst.
In this last chapter before “the little apocalypse,” we have Jesus pushing back against the traps, warning about the Temple’s authority figures—that they are worried about their own power more than they worry about enacting God’s reign—and guiding the people to see precisely how this power corrupts.
This background is necessary for seeing all that is to come: the apocalyptic vision of chapter 13 and the Passion to follow.