April 2024 – A Preacher’s Ponderings

Anything you wish

Fifth Sunday of Easter; 28 April 2024; Easter 5B (RCL); Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8.

The image of the vine is a guiding metaphor in the Old Testament for Israel. Psalm 80, a psalm of complaint in which Israel questions why God has not restored Jerusalem, speaks of Israel as a vine: You have brought a vine out of Egypt; you cast out the nations and planted it. Then after describing God’s care for the vine, the psalmist goes on to complain: Why have you broken down its wall, so that all who pass by pluck off its grapes. And then begs: Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; behold and tend this vine; preserve what your right hand has planted.

To lay down one’s life

Fourth Sunday of Easter; 21 April 2024; Easter 4B (RCL); Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18.

A guiding metaphor of the Johannine literature is the metaphor of laying down one’s life. The Greek idiom is not straightforward. A literal translation would be “to place one’s soul over” one’s friends. When 1 John says, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us,” it is using this same metaphor: “he placed his soul over us.” The Greek is τίθειν τἠν ψυχἠν ὑπέρ – tithein ten psychen hyper, to place the soul over, or above, or on behalf of.

Bread and fish

Third Sunday of Easter; 14 April 2024; Easter 3B (RCL); Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48.

On the Third Sunday of Easter, we hear the collect which speaks of Christ being made know in the breaking of the bread. This is a direct reference to the story of Jesus and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which comes immediately before the passage we hear this Sunday. The two disciples run back to Jerusalem, and this scene takes place in which Jesus eats a piece of broiled fish.

Resurrected wounds

Second Sunday of Easter; 7 April 2024; Easter 2B (RCL); Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1 – 2:2; John 20:19-31.

This passage in John’s Gospel is one of the richest and most consequential in his Gospel, and I would argue, in the New Testament. The narrative portion of John’s Gospel begins (after the Prologue) with John the Baptist seeing Jesus walk by, and declaring, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” In the OT, there is no lamb that takes away sin. That office belongs to the goat on the Great Day of Atonement, so John is inventing a new category of sacrifice here. And we see Jesus die at the exact hour that the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the Temple court, so the evangelist ties up part of that declaration by showing Jesus as the new Passover lamb. But no mention of sin in the crucifixion narrative.