Senseless gospel

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Key's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

Once I finished working with this week’s gospel text, I went back into my files to see how many times I’ve managed to preach on it in my seven circuits through the lectionary. I found that I’ve missed it more often than not—no surprise there, as it falls at a convenient time of year for that. And when I have preached on it, the sermon has always been on one half of the text or the other—either on the scene in the Nazareth synagogue or on the sending of the disciples. I have never written a sermon that dealt with both stories.

This is one of those weeks where the lectionary offers us a gospel reading that is more liturgical than literary. Scholars, at the least the scholars on my shelves, are unanimous that Mark 6:6 is a fairly significant transition in the structure of the gospel. The Nazareth synagogue ends a section of the gospel, and the sending of the disciples begins Mark’s next move. The lectionary does not like short gospel readings, so it blows through this transition and pretends that all 13 verses are one coherent unit. This makes preaching on the text as a whole a particular challenge—one that I have apparently found easy enough to avoid.