Lectionary Notes and More

The Week of Quadragesima: Lent I
Sunday, 21 February AD 2010

It’s Friday morning, the third day of Lent, and near the end of a very busy week. There were pancakes on Tuesday, two celebrations of the Ash Wednesday rite, Stations of the Cross and the first session of a Lenten Study yesterday evening. There eas also the preparation of the study, and there’s still a sermon to get ready for Sunday (even though there’s also Vestry)! So in providing some reflections on this week’s readings, I find that I must fall back on other resources —at least more obviously than I usually do. Nonetheless, I trust that these comments will be of some assistance. As always, the notes at the RCL site are helpful.

Anglican Resources for Anglicans

When we come to the Gospel reading, I will direct you to some sermons from the past which I have found very helpful. This reminds me to mention a very valuable Anglican resource you may not have met yet It is Project Canterbury, “a free online archive of out-of-print Anglican texts and related modern documents,” which may be found at http://anglicanhistory.org/.

Another useful site is The Anglican Library. “The aim of the Anglican Library is to publish new HTML editions of Christian literature from the Anglican tradition and other works that have traditionally been of interest to Anglicans. In addition, we hope to serve as a guide to Anglican literature located elsewhere on the internet.”

See http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/index.htm.

The Readings
Deuteronomy 26.1-11

In Year C the first reading is the passage from Deuteronomy which gives directions for the ofering of firstfruits in thanksgiving in the promised Land. In the Roman Missal, a shorter section is read from this chapter; it is only verses 4-10, the declaration to be made when the offering is handed over to the priest. This declaration centres on God’s mighty act of salvation in the Exodus. A note in the New St Joseph Daily Missal reminds that the Exodus had “a meaning similar to what the death and resurrection of Jesus means to us as Christians. Both are might acts of God resulting in liberation. Both inspire a Confession of Faith in which these mighty acts are recited.” At the beginning of Lent this reading makes us look forward to the Christian Passover which is the goal of the season and all its disciplines.

Psalm 91.1-2, 9-16

This psalm is classed as a psalm of trust ending with an oracle of salvation (vv. 14-16); the promse of glory and length of days in the final oracle points to the kings as being its recipient. Verses 10-11 are quoted by the devil in today’s Gospel reading. The art of quotation, it has been said, is knowing when to stop. It is interesting to note that in Luke 4.11, the devil stops quoting this psalm at v. 12, omitting the next verse which promise that with the help of angels the faithful will trample on wild beasts, in which, as the NJBC puts it, “the psalm moves from God’s protecting his faithful one to his equipping him to battle evil (cf.Ps 18)”.

The Epistle: Romans 10.8b-13

The notes in the St Joseph Missal identify this reading as containing a Baptismal confession (v.9), thereby linking it to the confession in the first reading.
The Comments in the New Oxford Annotated Bible and in the NJBC are helpful, placing this passage in the wider section, Romans 9.30-10.13, in which St Paul is explaining that “true righteousness is by faith”, which is in turn part of his argument that the new way of righteousness in Christ Jesus does not contradict God’s promises of old to Israel (9.1-11.36). Thus the Gentiles who come to confess that Jesus is Lord are called by the same Lord who called Israel to be his people (10.12).

The Holy Gospel: Luke 4.1-11

Every year on the first Sunday in Lent the Gospel readings tell us of the Temptation of our Lord in the Wilderness, because it is on his forty days’ fast that Lent is modelled. Perhaps you will forgive me for sending you to some works which I have found to be better reflections on this Sunday’s Gospel reading than anything I can think up.. For years my first reading about the Temptation has been in sermons of two great Anglican preachers of the seventeenth century.
John Cosin (1594-1672), Bishop of Durham, and one of the architects of the Restoration of the Church in 1660, preached two sermons on our Lord’s Temptations. When and where he preached them is not recorded, but it seems likely that it was at his parish of Brancepath in Yorkshire, perhaps soon before 1630. They may be found on line at
http://anglicanhistory.org/lact/cosin/1/sermon4.html

and
http://anglicanhistory.org/lact/cosin/1/sermon5.html

One reason I think Cosin’s two sermons were for his parish is that they are clearly based on a series of seven sermons on the Temptations by Lancelot Andrewes, and are very compressed and simplified versions of them. Andrewes' sermons may be found in his collected Works, volume 5, and are on line at
http://anglicanhistory.org/lact/andrewes/v5/index.html.

Don’t forget to check the collection of patristic commentaries in the Catena Aurea at http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea-Luke4.php.

Now it's Friday noon, and that’s all there is for this week.

Lectionary Notes

Some Thoughts on the First Sunday in Lent
1 March AD 2009

Dear Readers: Once again I find myself pressed for time on Friday afternoon, with a sermon not yet done. There are some points about today's first reading and those of the other Sundays of Lent which should help us to put our Lenten discipline in a better focus. I would like to say something about the Gospel, but I doubt that I will have a chance. In brief, I will note that the account of our Lord's temptation in Mark's Gospel does not mention his fasting in the forty days in the desert. This lessens the didactic use of the story to teach us that as Jesus fasted forty days so we have forty days of Lent. It is reasonable to take the fasting as implied by being in the desert and by the note that the angels ministered to him. Still, the absence of a mention of the fast, as well as the lack of detail of the temptation, suggest that more should be made of the "wild animals". As you can see in the RC commentary, there is more than one interpretation of this verse. The most pleasing is that it marks Jesus as the new Adam, in a restored paradise (cf. Genesis 2.19f.). Here, then, we have the undoing of the temptation of Adam and Eve follwoed by a moment of paradise - the story of the Fall in reverse.

Lent and Covenant

Covenant is a central concept in the Scriptures. It is defined by the NOAB as “a term of relationship between a superior and an inferior party, the former ‘establishing’ the bond”. We are used to speaking of the old covenant and the new covenant (and might note here that Testament, as it is used in the Bible is usually a synonym for covenant). In fact the scriptures speak of a series of covenants. In Hunting the divine fox : images and mystery in Christian faith, Robert Farrar Capon discusses the series of covenants, discussing them in terms of the promise, the commandment and the sign of each one.
The concept first appears in the story of Noah, as seen in the first reading today, Genesis 9.8-17 (there is in fact an earlier mention of covenant in the same story (Genesis 6:18). Unlike the later covenants with Abraham (Genesis 17) and the people of Israel at Mount Sinai (Exodus 24), ), this is a universal covenant with Noah, his descendants, and with every living creature, for Noah’s three sons (6.10,18-19) are regarded as the ancestors of all the nations (see chapter 10). The promise of the covenant is that God will never again destroy all life on earth by a flood; in verses 1-7 we read that God commands Noah and his descendants to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”; he gives them the living creatures for food but forbids the eating of blood, which is the life of the flesh. The sign of the covenant is the rainbow (verses 13-16). The bow was thought to be God’s weapon from which the lightnings of his arrows were shot (Ps 7.12-13; Hab 3.9-11) ; God hangs this weapon in the sky as a sign that he has put away his wrath. A further point is that the bow is not merely placed in the sky, but that it is aiming upwards. Thus God can be understood as aiming the bow, and his wrath, at himself (Capon).
The first readings for most Sundays of Lent are concerned with the succession of covenants: On Lent II it is the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16). On Lent III, the Ten Commandments. On Lent IV in Year B we read of the bronze serpent (Numbers 21.4-9) which is a type of the crucified Lord (John 3.14-21). This seems to be the exception, for on Lent V we read Jeremiah 31.31-34, in which the Lord promises a new covenant. This series of readings provides an important framework for keeping Lent.
If Lent is a preparation for Easter, we might ask in what way we are preparing. It could simply be that the great feast is prepared for by the great fast, so that out celebration is all the more intense and happy. Aside from feasting and celebrating, though, there an action we perform at Easter that needs careful preparation. That is the celebration of Baptism or the renewal of Baptismal vows. It is through Baptism that we enter into the new covenant with God in Christ, the everlasting covenant, and at Easter we are asked to renew the promised we made in Baptism (see BAS, pp. 330-332); it is no accident that in the liturgy of Baptism these vows are entitled: The Baptismal Covenant (p.158). As we hear the first readings on the Sundays of Lent, then, let us remember that we are listening to a history that was constantly pointing to and which were fulfilled in the New Covenant made in the Passover of Christ Jesus from death to new life, of which the signs are chiefly Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, of which the commandments are the laws of love, and of which the promise is the new heaven and the new earth, the dwelling of God with us see Revelation 21).