Living by the Word

Reflections on the lectionary readings by pastors, preachers and biblical scholars

Photo by Mary Harrsch

He is risen!

Mark 16: 1-8

Apr 12, 2000 by Samuel Wells

Easter morning is the defining place and moment of Christian space and time. It is the Christian Genesis: male and female in a garden, darkness becoming light. The first day. It is the Christian nemesis: death and despair displaced by life and hope. The last day.

Who is he kidding?

Mark 11: 1-11

Apr 05, 2000 by Samuel Wells

Mark’s Gospel is some kind of joke. It announces itself as the story of the Son of God, but it doesn’t begin with glory. Instead it starts in obscurity in the wilderness. It portrays the disciples—surely the leaders of the church in Mark’s day—as bungling fools. They watch Jesus perform one miracle, then doubt his ability to do the next.

Regeneration

Psalm 51

Mar 22, 2000 by Samuel Wells

The one who voices Psalm 51 is on the floor before God, utterly ashamed and as dust before glory: “My sin is ever before me.” The symptoms of sin are gradually displaced by the greater reality of God: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned.” The speaker does not look outside for an oppressor to blame, but inside, to the “inward being,” for a heart to be renewed.

God spoke these words

Exodus 20:1-17

Mar 15, 2000 by Samuel Wells

It was Boxing Day 1989. Romania was in turmoil. The previous day, President Nicolae Ceausescu, unable to quell the tide of dissent in Bucharest, had been tried and executed. Now no one was in charge. Western reporters flooded into the country from the south, searching for someone who could speak English.

Holiness: Sacrifice

Mark 8:31-38

Mar 08, 2000 by Samuel Wells

Imagine being crucified. Imagine, first of all, the physical torture. Brutal hands forcing your body into a contorted shape. Hammer and nails piercing whole frontiers of agony in hand and foot. Sagging lungs dragging your thorax down, so that every breath is an increasing effort, a fight against suffocation.