It’s been a busy week with family stuff, so I apologize for the lateness of this week’s Lectionary Help. I’ll offer a few quick helps here since Palm Sunday and Holy Week offer so much material for us to preach on.
In Rigged Trial; Real Redemption (Luke 22:54–62) | Sunday Morning Greek Blog, I cover the injustices of the way the Jews used their own “legal” system to condemn Jesus. Everything about the trial before the Sanhedrin was contrary to their own laws and customs. It’s an early example of what we’ve come to call “lawfare” today.
Matthew indicates that Judas threw his blood money back in the temple and hanged himself after betraying Jesus. The pharisees bought the field where Judas hanged himself with that money (Matthew 27:5–10), which is why in Acts 1:18, Peter can say Judas bought the field. It was by proxy through the Pharisees, because they didn’t want their name associated with the title to the land because it was purchased with blood money.
Most scholars believe the description in Acts about Judas’s body bursting open is not a contradiction to Matthew’s “hanging” account. The Acts account comes from Peter to a small group of believers who were already familiar with the full story. It’s likely that Judas’s body started to bloat after he died on the tree and either the rope or the branch it was hanging from broke and caused the gruesome scene.
I also came across the following note on Matthew 27:28–31 in my files:
“The Greek text here has several words with the /pt/ sound or /p/ followed by an unstressed vowel sound. I have to think this is intentional on Matthew’s part to emphasize the mocking (ἐνέπαιξαν, from ἐμπαίζω) aspect of the scene. This passage is a chiasm as well, centering around the mocking (but true) statement, ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’”
One final note: Golgotha is likely the exact location (give or take a few hundred feet) where Abraham had taken Isaac to sacrifice him. The Hebrew text where Abraham says “God himself will provide the lamb” can be repointed (i.e., have a different vowel arrangement below the consonants; vowels weren’t added to the Hebrew text until about AD 1000) to say “God will provide himself as the lamb.” Consider the significance of that for a hot minute.
Peace to you as you approach Holy Week and the Easter season.
I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE, on March 22, 2026. I had already preached my best message on Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead a couple times here, which was the gospel passage for the fifth Sunday of Lent, so I preached on the OT reading for this Sunday. I give a brief summary of all the “raised from the dead” passages in the Bible before tackling Ezekiel 37 and its context.
Do you know how many stories of dead people coming back to life are in the Bible? When I typed the question into Google to confirm if my own recollection was correct, I confirmed there are in fact ten, count ‘em, ten stories of people rising from the dead. Three of the stories are in the Old Testament, five in the gospels, and two in the book of Acts. Ezekiel 37, which I’ll read here in a bit, is another story of dead bones receiving new flesh and new breath, but it seems to end there. It reads more like a parable rather than an actual historic event, but it does seem to prefigure the story in Matthew 27:50–54 (which is included in the count) about the dead coming out of their tombs and graves the moment Jesus died on the cross.
Allow me to quickly recap the 10 miracles here so we can place the stories in their historical contexts.
Elijah raised the son of a widow in Zarephath during the drought in 1 Kings 17. Not to be outdone, Elisha did the same for a Shunammite woman’s son in Shunem. Nain, where Jesus raised the son of a widow in Luke 7, is located about halfway between Shunem and Zarephath.
Backtracking for a moment, there’s a little-known story in 2 Kings 13:20-21 where Elisha raises another man from the dead, even though Elisha had been dead for a few days! Here’s the account in 2 Kings 13:20–21:
20 Elisha died and was buried.
Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. 21 Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.[1]
Getting back to the New Testament, in the next chapter after the boy from Nain is raised, Jesus raises the dead daughter of Jairus, a synagogue ruler. Of course, we also have Lazarus from our gospel passage this morning.
The most prominent one, though, is Jesus at the end of each of the gospels. He cites the first line of Psalm 22 to remind us that this was all prophesied a long time before his crucifixion. Psalm 22 has many details that were fulfilled in the crucifixion stories of the gospels. In Matthew 27, as I alluded to above, several people came out of their graves. Most scholars who consider that a real event assume that those people were reunited with their families, at least for a short time. It would seem odd for God to bring them back to life only to send them right back to their graves, so some scholars have suggested that they may have gone into glory when Jesus rose from the grave that first Easter morning!
Toward the end of Acts chapter 9, a young disciple named Tabitha who served the poor faithfully became sick and died. This happened in Joppa while Peter was ministering in nearby Lydda. The disciples called for Peter to come. Peter did not hesitate, and after he prayed for the young woman, he looked at her and commanded her to get up! Of course, she obliged and was restored to her community of believers.
Later, in Acts 20, Paul is giving a marathon sermon that went long into the night, and a young man named Eutychus was sitting in a third-story window listening to his message. He fell asleep, fell out of the window, and died. Paul went down and in true Elijah/Elisha fashion, stretched himself out over the young man, and God restored life to him.
These are all the stories in the Bible about people miraculously restored to life after being declared dead. In every instance, with the exception of Jesus, others were around to witness these events. The women who went to Jesus’s tomb arrived shortly after Jesus had risen, because he warned them not to touch him. And given how Jesus was treated on the cross, there was absolutely no doubt that he had died as well.
But there’s one “event” that I referred to earlier that seems to have been a vision for Ezekiel in chapter 37 and not an actual event, although the description seems real enough. The context and historical setting of this chapter is important. Ezekiel is part of the second wave of exiles being transported to Babylon. He had wanted to be a priest, but the exile happened before he could attain that position. Instead, God called him to be a prophet to the exiles and, in the latter chapters especially, to be an encouragement to them in their captivity, assuring them that one day they would be restored to the Promised Land.
Ezekiel proclaims that his role is a Watchman (ch. 33) and a messenger of the Lord, Israel’s Shepherd (ch. 34). He gives Israel and Judah the promise that they will once again be one nation after the exile. In chapter 36, he speaks of hope for the mountains of Israel and the assurance of the restoration of Israel as a nation, the chosen people of God. Ezekiel gives specific enough dates in these chapters that we can know he’s writing around 585 B.C., about 20 years after the first wave of exiles (that included Daniel) was transported.
Hear the words of Ezekiel 37:1–14:
The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’ ”
7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ ” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’ ”[2]
The imagery is fairly simple to understand. The dry bones represent Israel in exile. They had finally withered up and dried out as a nation because they refused to follow the Lord. They had spent some 500 years in the land and never once did they give the land its rest every seven years. So now they faced 70 years of exile, one year for each of the years the land never received its rest.
God commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones to reanimate them. Ezekiel does so, and the bones begin to rattle like a china cabinet in an earthquake. Before Ezekiel’s eyes, he sees tendons and muscles and veins and organs form on these bones and finally a skin covering, and I would even speculate there was hair on their heads and the rest of their bodies. I don’t believe they all looked alike, like a bunch of clones. But there they were. Instead of just bones lying around, Ezekiel saw bodies lying around waiting for the breath of life. We’re not sure how many, but Ezekiel describes it as a vast army.
God then tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the “breath” so that these bodies can be filled with the breath of life again to live. And again, it worked! All these bodies began to breathe and rise to their feet. God closes out this scene by reassuring Ezekiel that God will indeed restore Israel to their homeland. The part about opening the graves and bringing them out again sounds very much like what happened in Matthew 27, when the dead came out of their graves after Jesus’s resurrection. Yet neither of my study Bibles make that connection between these two passages. I did, however, find a couple commentaries that make this connection.[3], [4]It’s hard not to think of Matthew 27:50–54 as a fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.
What is interesting here is that the word for “breath” is the exact same word in Hebrew that is translated “spirit” (as in Holy Spirit) in many other places. This is where I think we can make the connection to our own context today. COVID was a type of exile for churches everywhere. We were all but coerced to abandon meeting together in our familiar church settings and dwell in the foreign territory of “virtual church.” Some churches were connected enough and had enough resources and dedication of membership to persevere through that time. Many smaller congregations, however, did not survive or are still struggling mightily to get back to where they were.
Even before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we were beginning to see revival take place, especially among young people. God was bringing life to the “dead bones” of those who had previously seen no hope in the church. The younger generation began to see what they had missed after willingly (or was it addictively?) spending hours per day on electronic devices only to have such a lifestyle imposed on them unwillingly by COVID and the powers that be. They didn’t like that imposition and started rebelling against it. Revival is happening because new and long-time believers stopped taking their freedoms for granted after they had them stripped for a season.
God is always moving through his Holy Spirit to bring redemption and revival for those he’s called and who call upon him. As believers, Christ-followers, we’re called to “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.”[5] If we are faithful to our respective ministries and to seeking the Lord with all our hearts, our faith will not return void. We will reap a harvest we may not have anticipated. I heard this the other day from an unlikely source, but it makes a lot of sense: While we are waiting on God, we should do what waiters do: serve.
May God continue to bless your ministry efforts here at Mount View. Amen.
[3] Green, Michael. 2001. The Message of Matthew: The Kingdom of Heaven. “Matthew 27:32–56.” The Bible Speaks Today. Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
The gospel passage this week is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It is the only one of the seven miracles of Jesus recorded that coincides one of his seven “I am” statements he makes in John’s gospel in the same chapter.\
This passage shows the full range of Jesus’s human and divine natures, especially the human emotions that Jesus expressed. It’s important to emphasize Jesus’s humanity as evidence that he was a high priest able “to empathize with our human weaknesses—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15),
Martha is the one trying to hold it all together. It seems as if she’s not even started the grieving process yet. She and Mary are both upset that Jesus didn’t get there in time. But Martha is sure of the resurrection, something many of the disciples, I think, were still trying to wrap their heads around.
Jesus’s response just before he himself weeps is worth noting here. When John says Jesus was “deeply moved…and troubled” (NIV), some commentators have suggested Jesus may have groaned in agony or even anger at death itself. He was doing all he could to control his emotions when he asked, “Where have you laid him?” I’m not so sure he asked that politely. More like, “Let’s get this over with.”
Jesus seems to be in take-charge mode at this point. In vs. 38 we see he is “deeply moved” again, to the “Take away the stone!” command may have sounded like a very frustrated outburst.
We must be careful not to generalize from Jesus’s actions and attitudes in this event any sort of pattern for how you and I respond to the death of a loved one. Each one of us handles grief in our own unique way, but the one generalization we can make is that Jesus was fully relying on God in this moment of earthly existence. The one who came to bring us life had to confront the very thing he came to defeat.
I do hope this will give you some good ideas on how to make this story “come to life” (so to speak) for your congregation. I’ve included a couple links below, one with an audio file of my sermon, and the other that highlights the connections between Jesus’s miracles and his “I am” statements in John.
We have a long gospel passage for the fourth Sunday in Lent. In the congregation I preach in, I will typically read the entire gospel passage prior to the message. I have not previously preached on this passage for lent, but three years ago when I preached on John 4 for the third Sunday in Lent, I showed the clip from that scene in The Chosen instead of reading the passage. Here is the YouTube clip of healing of the man born blind from Season 4, Episode 3.
Jesus repeats his “I am the light of the world” statement in 9:5 (originally spoken in 8:12), which seems to close the loop on that description of Jesus and his actions. The miracle of bringing light to the man’s eyes for the first time is definitive proof of that claim. In the broader context of Scripture, this harkens back to Isaiah 9, as I’ve indicated in other passages where light is a significant theme. This also seems to be the final proof that John offers for his opening statements in chapter 1 about Jesus being “light,” especially the “light” of Genesis 1:3, the firstborn of all creation. Jesus would be the physical, visible representation of God’s divine nature in his incarnation.
This passage is unusual in that a large section of it (vv. 13–34) happens apart from the presence of Jesus and his disciples. This only happens a couple times in John (the other occurrence is in 11:45–57, where the Jews are plotting to kill Jesus after he raised Lazarus from the dead). It would seem reasonable that the healed man would have relayed the story to Jesus or his disciples when Jesus sees him again in 9:35. The greater the miracle, the more intense the religious leaders’ desire to take Jesus out.
This section of the passage gives us some sense of how the Pharisees seemed to operate to protect their legalistic view of the Law. It shows how they participated in the darkness, having important discussions about the nature of sin and the impact of healing on the Sabbath behind closed doors and coercing (unsuccessfully) the healed man to recant his claim of Jesus healing, especially on the Sabbath. Worse yet, they were trying to get him to say something damning about Jesus, but he was too excited and too grateful to turn his back on the savior. You can almost feel the power of the Pharisees draining from their fingertips before their very (blind) eyes.
The healed man’s courage to speak the truth about who Jesus is and what he’s done for him is a testimony for all believers in this day and age where Christian persecution seems to be increasing in the heartland of America and elsewhere. But people are responding with a desire for faithfulness in Christ in great numbers in spite of (or because of?) it.
I’ll close out here with a couple links to my articles on “I Am the Light of the World” if you want to dig deeper into that topic. Peace to you in the next week. May God richly bless your ministry as you proclaim his word to those within your influence.
Lectionary Help for Third Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2026, Year A.
Taking a look at the literary context and historical setting of the account of Jesus speaking to the woman at the well in Samaria can help answer a few questions people may have about this passage. For example, why was Jesus so insistent that he “had” to go through Samaria? Consider the following points.
John begins his gospel by saying Jesus is the light of the world and has been around “from the beginning.”
Jesus shows his earthly authority over the Temple at Jerusalem by overturning the tables of the money changers, yet that doesn’t seem to be enough for him to insist that Jerusalem is the proper (or only) place of worship.
The well where he meets the woman is Jacob’s well. Jacob, of course, is one of Jesus’s earthly ancestors, so Jesus is in the land of his ancestors when he first reveals (at least in John’s gospel) he is the Messiah. That fact shouldn’t be overlooked.
“He establishes Jesus is fully divine and that God is his Father. Since he’s God’s “only begotten” on Earth, Jesus then is the primary authority in the Temple, which the Jews believed was home of God’s presence. Finally, Jesus, having been established as the authority for the Jewish religion, essentially abolishes the long-standing prejudice against Samaria by going to the place where his ancestor Judah’s father, Jacob (renamed Israel) first established himself in the Promised Land after returning from Laban’s home. I think this aspect of the story lends to its credibility and to the principle of worship he puts forth.”
The epistles passage is Romans 5:1–11. This is where Paul makes the point that Christ died for us “while we were still sinners.” This ties in nicely with the woman at the well story, of course, as Jesus is offering the woman living water in spite of her current social and relationship status.
A few Old Testament passages can provide some background for the “living water” Jesus speaks of. Isaiah 49 (esp. vv. 6 & 10) speaks of springs of fresh water, while Jeremiah 2:13 and 17:13 both describe the Lord as the Jews’ “spring of living water.” Of course, we can’t forget Ezekiel’s prophecy in 14:8–9:
“On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half of it east to the Dead Sea and half of it west to the Mediterranean Sea, in summer and in winter. 9 The Lord will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name the only name.”
I pray this helps you prepare this week. I’m updating my previous message, which includes both NT passages, to reflect some of the things I’ve learned or rediscovered in my recent work in Romans.
Option A is John 3:1–17, which I’ll cover in this post.
On “born again” in John 3:3, 3:7:
A word study of ἄνωθεν (anōthen) along with the context of the discussion between vv. 3 & 7 suggests that the more likely meaning here would be as an adverb of place (“born from above”) as opposed to an adverb of time (“born again” or “born anew”). “Born of water” (vs. 5) most likely refers to natural birth, while “[born of] the Spirit” refers to being renewed by Spirit through his infilling, which of course can only come from above.
Regarding the Serpent on the pole:
God told Moses to fashion what in Hebrew is called a saraph (שָׂרָף śārāp̄), a bronze serpent that itself must have had a fiery appearance in the desert sun and put it on a pole so the Israelites who were bitten could look upon it and live. However, it did nothing for those who had already died. This bronze serpent was not an idol originally[1] but rather something akin to a sign of judgment on the Israelites. It couldn’t save them from the pain of being bitten by the snakes, but it would save them from the poison that had entered their bodies. Something else was absorbing the fatal penalty of their disbelief. It’s a bit of a mystery why the word for the winged angels, or seraphim, of Isaiah 6 is also translated snake or serpent elsewhere. Regardless of the specifics of what it looked like, it must have fostered some measure of fear among the Israelites. “You can look at the scary bronze snake, or you can die from the real ones.”[2]
The serpents were cursing the Israelites with death, but if they would look upon the image of the curse, they would live. Jesus took on the curse of sin for us by being lifted up on a cross. We need to look to Jesus to be saved.
May God bless your sermon and lesson preparation this week as we settle into the season of Lent.
I preached this message on February 22, 2026, the First Sunday in Lent, Year A.
When you think about it, Satanism, the worship of Satan, is an oxymoron. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. “That’s a weird way to start a sermon, preacher!” Yep, guilty as charged. But seriously, why would anyone want to put their “faith” in Satan when all the evidence points his core nature? He’s pure evil. He’s deceptive. He hates those who worship God. I would dare say he’s more interested in getting you to not worship and serve God than he is having people worship him. But he can ignore those people, because they’re already solidly in his camp.
John says this about the devil when he confronts the Pharisees in the Temple in John 8:
44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46 Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? [1]*
Adam and Eve had a first-hand encounter with Satan in the very beginning. He lied about what eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could do for them. Yes, after eating the apple, they did experience the shame of their nakedness, so at least that much of what Satan said was true, but it was a half-truth at best. The lie that Satan told Eve was “You will be like God.” That was a lie in so many ways, and here’s why:
God is not just omniscient, knowing all that can be known, but he is omnipotent and omnipresent as well. Adam and Eve, relatively speaking, only got a fraction of the knowledge that God had about such things and NONE of the power or presence that God had. Their shame at disobeying caused them to fear the presence of God when God had designed Eden and the world for them to live in his presence. They lost power, because at that point, death became a necessity for survival. An animal would have to die to clothe them. Blood sacrifices became necessary for temporary atonement. And God’s son would have to die to redeem them forever from the curse.
Satan won that first round with God’s precious new creation, but out of that came the first prophecy of Satan’s defeat at the hands and feet of God’s son. It’s no wonder, then, that he thought he could try and pull that off when God’s one and only son came on the scene. If he could get Jesus to stumble, the world would be his, or so he thought.
In the garden, Eve had become convinced somehow that the forbidden fruit “was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” It shouldn’t surprise us that Satan used those same three categories to tempt Jesus in the desert as in our Gospel passage this morning. “I know you’re hungry for some food, Jesus. Go ahead and turn these stones into bread.” But Jesus knew, unlike Adam and Eve, that there was more to God than producing a little supernatural “manna” to satisfy what must have been an intense human experience of hunger. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Satan tried to trick him by twisting a promise of God into a perversion of wisdom. “Come on Jesus. You know God will catch you if you jump off the top of the Temple here! Imagine the scene when the crowd watches the angels swoop you up at the last second! You’ll be a superhero!” But Jesus knows it is foolish to put God to the test like that, and rebuked Satan with that fact in no uncertain terms.
Satan had one more chance. He took Jesus to a high mountain where he had a “pleasing sight” awaiting him—”all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” But once again, Jesus knew the price was too high to go along with Satan’s schemes, and he knew none of them would bring about what God had promised him when he fulfilled his mission. “You know the commandment, Satan. I will have no other gods before me. He was there to “worship the Lord God and serve him only.” The liar failed at trying to fool the one in whom there was no lie and only truth.
And that was the beginning of the end for Satan. Jesus won that battle, but Satan didn’t give up that easily. He had to switch his focus to others, and most of you know who that would be: someone from his inner circle. The signs would be there early on that something wasn’t quite right with Judas. Even Peter gets some of the blame, but that, it seems, may have been more to his impetuous nature at times, and Jesus had other plans for him anyway.
The power of death was defeated at the cross. I’m sure that was something that Satan actually felt. Jesus had even told Peter that the gates of hell could not withstand the coming of God’s kingdom, and I think for a while anyway, as the church began to coalesce after Pentecost, God and Jesus kept Satan at bay to give the fledgling believers a head start at getting the gospel out.
I want to turn now to Romans 5:12–19, the other New Testament passage in the Lectionary readings today, to look at the results, if you will, of Jesus’s victory over death and how he, as the New Adam, broke the curse brought on by the First Adam, who through passivity allowed his wife to give in to the serpent and joined her in her disobedience. Romans 5 has a powerful message about how you and I can be strengthened in our own faith walk because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross and in his resurrection from the dead.
Hear what Paul has to say:
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—
13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.[2]
Even though Paul says plainly in 1 Timothy 2:14 that it was Eve who was deceived and sinned first (sorry, ladies, I’m just the messenger here), Paul considers the blame for “original sin” to be squarely on Adam’s shoulders. Adam had one command, and he (and Eve) blew it. But because it was a single command and the Law had not come yet, God could not permanently charge Adam with a violation of his law. Instead, they were expelled from the garden because they could not be trusted. That doesn’t mean they weren’t loved, though. God would declare even as he announced their punishment that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.
Paul demonstrates that Jesus fulfilled the role that Adam never could. Adam’s disobedience or lack of faithfulness brought sin into the world, but Jesus’s one act of faithful obedience, submitting to crucifixion, is the only act that could defeat the power of sin once for all and bring righteousness to all who would follow him. It took one sin by Adam to mess up things for everybody, but one faithfully obedient savior to restore us to God in his righteousness.
Romans says that Jesus Christ is our righteousness. He earned that designation by fulfilling the whole Law of God. But God still needed that once-for-all blood sacrifice that would make the animal and grain sacrifices of the Old Testament completely obsolete. Jesus was the only one who could be that spotless lamb. But it wasn’t just because of his 100% obedience to the law. The crucifixion had one more element that made it absolutely effective and impossible for the devil to challenge or destroy: It was love, pure and simple.
“For God so loved the world.” Only a perfect man with a fully divine nature who showed us beyond a shadow of doubt how he and his Father loved us in person and face to face could make that sacrifice. The bulls and goats and birds that were sacrificed under the Old Covenant could not ever love us the way Jesus did and does, which is why his sacrifice stands not only above the old sacrificial system, but above every other religion as well. Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was a real person, but he never loved anything about the world that should have mattered to him. He just tried to obtain a state of nothingness, a very selfish goal that no one else, by definition, could help him achieve. There’s no personal connection there and no promise of any help from the supernatural realm. Jesus’s sacrifice was by far the most superior of any that could have happened on this world God created with love, and the only one that can guarantee us eternal life in God’s glorious new kingdom.
As believers, then, know that you are “in Christ” in every sense of the concept. We are baptized “into Christ,” which means we are baptized into his death. So we share in his death so we can be free of the requirements of the law, beneficiaries of grace, and servants of righteousness. As you go forth in the world from here, declare God’s word unashamedly to those who need to hear the hope of his good news. Amen.
[1]The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. *I didn’t say it in my message, but I sure thought about adding: “The Pharisees must have had Jesus Derangement Syndrome.”
Welcome to Lectionary Help for the first Sunday of Lent, February 22, 2026, the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. The celebration of Easter/Resurrection of the Lord is on April 5 this year.
I’ll just pull a relevant quote from the sermon linked above, as I think it’s succinct enough to give you the sense of the words used for “temptation” and “testing.”
Word Study (from the sermon linked above)
Tempt, test (πειράζω peirazō)
Temptation, testing (πειρασμός peirasmos)
So why do three of the versions I mentioned use “test” instead of “temptation” for the same Greek or Hebrew word? Well, as I tell my students when they ask me questions like that, the answer is “context, context, context.” If you follow the use of the words in their respective story settings, you find that “testing” has to do with the relationship between God and humans. The general thrust of the verses in question goes one of three ways: either God is testing his people to see how they respond, or the people are testing God by NOT doing what he’s commanded them to do, or one person is testing another’s character. And consistent with the concept of testing, sometimes there’s a judgment or “grade” on how we responded to the test.
“Temptation” is a subset of testing. That is, all temptations are tests, but not all tests are temptations. The word “temptation” is used by these English translation committees to indicate a situation in which some personified evil power or influence is at work.
Application
In the message above, I offer three ways after the example of Jesus to fight against temptation and weaken their influence in your life:
Pray! (Hebrews 4:15–16)
Live in the will of God; Live “in Christ” (1 John 2:15–17)
Memorize and proclaim God’s word (Psalm 119:11)
Epistles passage (Romans 5:12–19)
If you’re looking for a different angle to approach the theme, consider using Romans 5:12–19 as your starting point. I’ve had Romans on the brain for the past couple months because I gave the kickoff message to our 2026 first semester church-wide small group study in Romans (Romans 1 & 2: Jesus Our Righteous and Faithful Savior (StoneBridge small group kickoff) | Sunday Morning Greek Blog). I side with the subjective genitive approach to Romans when it comes to talking about both righteousness and faithfulness, so Jesus is “the righteous one who lives by [his] faithfulness” and we’re saved through the faithfulness of Jesus, the Righteous One.
Having established my foundation for my understanding of Romans, I’ll give some quick hits here.
The “sin entered the world through one man” concept is countered by Jesus, the Righteousness of God, the “one man” through whom all are made righteous by being “in Christ.” Jesus’s faithfulness secures that for us.
Verse 19 makes the connection to the stated theme of Romans (leading the Gentiles to the “obedience of faithfulness”; 1:5 & 16:26): “Through the obedience [of faithfulness] of the one man the many will be made righteous.” This is the set-up for Paul’s discussion of baptism in chapter 6: If we’re baptized into Christ, we’re baptized into his death. That “death” is how we’re freed from the law (Romans 7), and our subsequent emersion (coming out of the baptismal waters) results in life “in Christ.” Our righteousness is not something separate imparted to us; it’s something we walk in when we walk “in Christ.”
Blessings this week as you enter into the Lenten season. If you’re in a tradition that gives up something for Lent, try giving up those things that keep you from drawing closer to your Savior. I’ve preached the above sermon twice in the last four years, so time for me write something afresh.
I preached this message on April 6, 2025, which was also National Tartan Day. I wore the standard Gordon family kilt (great-great-grandfather through the maternal line) and the necktie is Gordon Red (purchased in Scotland). I’ve included a few pictures. Now I can say I’ve preached in a kilt! :-)
The Lord be with you.
Before I get to my main message, I want to go back a few months when I preached on Psalm 126, our Old Testament reading this morning, because it was also our reading on October 27. At that time I said that we should consider verse 4 a prayer for this congregation: “Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev.” That continues to be my prayer for this congregation today, and I hope it is yours as well. I heard recently that church attendance is starting to pick up again, so I pray we can take the opportunity to tap into that resurgence.
Our gospel passage this morning, John 12:1–8, is one of the few stories of Jesus’s ministry that all four gospel authors included, probably because Matthew and Mark both said that what she’d done would be told wherever the gospel was preached. Matthew and Mark both include the story after the time of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and two days before the Last Supper. Luke places it much earlier in his gospel, and he emphasizes that the woman’s sins were forgiven because of what she’d done. We can’t be sure why Luke has the story so much earlier. He may be “borrowing” it from the future in his gospel so he can tie it in with the story of the response to forgiveness based on the depth of one’s sins.
But in our passage this morning from John, he places the story just before Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This event may serve to bring to mind the anointings that the Israelites were commanded to do for their priests and kings. Listen to what David says in the very short Psalm 133:
This refers to Leviticus 8, where not only was the oil poured on Aaron’s head for consecration, it was also used to consecrate everything in the newly assembled tabernacle. Matthew and Mark do not name the woman who brings in the alabaster jar. Nothing in those accounts suggests they know who the woman is. Luke says the woman lived a sinful life and suggests she shouldn’t even be there.
John is the only one who names the woman in his gospel. The woman is Mary, Lazarus’s sister. We do know a bit more about Mary and Martha than other people mentioned in passing in the Gospels. At the end of Luke 10, Martha is frustrated with Mary because she is sitting at Jesus’s feet listening to his teaching while Martha is busy preparing a meal. This probably isn’t the meal John mentions, and it’s nowhere near Luke’s account of the foot anointing. In the previous chapter of John, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead to prove he was the “resurrection and the life.” Lazarus’s death seems to have hit Mary the hardest in that story, as she is the one who seems most disturbed by Jesus’s delay in coming to see Lazarus. It makes sense, then, that Mary would be the one who wanted to anoint Jesus’s feet for resurrecting her beloved brother.
John is the only one who doesn’t indicate that the container for the nard was an alabaster jar, but the alabaster jar was considered the most appropriate container for nard or perfume at that time, so I think we’re safe to assume it was. Alabaster was made from gypsum, so it was somewhat delicate and finely textured. Breaking the seal probably meant that the neck of the jar had to be broken to pour the thick nard out and apply it. It wasn’t a very big jar either. We know it was about a pint, and it would have all had to have been used at that moment; otherwise it would spoil or lose its aroma. Matthew and Mark say the woman poured the nard on Jesus’s head, much like it would have been for the OT priests mentioned above, while Luke and John say the woman poured it on Jesus’s feet, perhaps an acknowledgment of Jesus’s servant attitude.
Although the details of this story vary among the gospel accounts, a couple themes of the story do stand out across the board. Many of those present at the dinner, especially Judas Iscariot in John’s account, view this as a wasteful act. This perfume was not cheap; Judas, along with other players in the parallel account, are concerned that such a valuable commodity could have been sold so the money would be given to the poor. John reminds us though that Judas’s concern was more selfish than compassionate. Judas had been helping himself to the till.
What this tells us, I think, for our walk with Christ today is that it’s okay to be a little extravagant when giving to the Lord’s work. Now obviously we don’t need to prepare Jesus for another crucifixion as the woman was doing in that day. But just as Jesus turned the water into the best wine served at the wedding at Cana for his first miracle, so we too can dedicate our excellence in whatever we do for or offer to the body of Christ and the work of the kingdom.
A second principle at work here is that, while the work of helping the poor is noble and a never-ending ministry of the church, there will be times when we have to take care of our own, and I’m not necessarily referring to when we die. It’s not selfish when we do that. It’s a necessary part of taking care of our family. While our loved ones are alive, we buy thoughtful gifts for them. When they pass, we pick out a nice coffin or urn. The ancient Jews used an ossuary, basically a stone box, to store the bones of a loved one once the flesh had decayed and often would put some sort of inscription on it. When the Jews brought Joseph’s bones out of Egypt, it was most likely in an Egyptian mummy case. That’s a little odd for us to think in those terms today, though, so we find other ways to memorialize our loved ones.
Unlike the pharisees and Judas Iscariot then, we should not look with judgment on those who do nice things for their loved ones at death. How we choose to remember a loved one is an important part of the grieving process. But I have to wonder here: Mary had already witnessed Jesus raise her brother Lazarus from the dead. Did she, or any of the other disciples for that matter, have any inkling that Jesus’s impending crucifixion might be followed up by his own resurrection? Judging from the disciples’ reaction in the gospels when Jesus spoke of his death, I’m pretty sure they hadn’t put two and two together yet.
Our gospel passage this morning has focused on what Mary did to prepare Jesus for his death. But what was Jesus doing to prepare his disciples for his death? We’ll address some of this after Easter in the Sundays leading up to Pentecost, but for now I think it’s important to see that, although he was speaking somewhat figuratively at times, he did not leave his disciples without reason for hope after his death.
The next event after our gospel passage this morning is Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem: Palm Sunday as we’ve come to know it. Chapter 13 is the Last Supper, where Jesus imparts his final teachings to his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion. John recorded five chapters worth of Jesus’s words, longer than the Sermon on the Mount. In those final hours he has with his disciples, he:
Models servanthood by washing their feet
Predicts Peter’s denial
Reassures them that he’ll come back to take them to the place he’s preparing for them
Promises the Holy Spirit will dwell in them and guide them in all truth
Encourages them to stay connected to the vine, to Jesus, so they can bear fruit
Reaffirms the coming, indwelling power of the Holy Spirit
Predicts that they will be scattered, but they will also eventually know peace
Prays for their unity so that the kingdom can move forward and their faith will be unshakable.
That must have been quite the emotional and gut-wrenching after-seder gathering. Most of what John records in those chapters was unique to his gospel. None of the other Gospel come close to the depth of this teaching. Luke and Matthew have passing references to receiving the Holy Spirit without too much detail to describe it. As a gospel writer, John seems to have had special dispensation to capture these final teachings. He, after all, was the only one who shows up at the cross on crucifixion day.
This is not to discount the other teachings of Jesus prior to his triumphal entry. His whole ministry was about preparing you and me for the new way God would work among his people. The Sermon on the Mount and the parables in Matthew; Luke’s sermon on the plain; and Mark’s emphasis on the urgency of Jesus’s ministry are all signs in their own way that Jesus was preparing ordinary people to extraordinary things for the kingdom of God.
Isaiah looked forward to this new time in 43:18–19:
As we continue toward Easter, you and I know how the story ends. We do not need to fret like those first disciples. We know we have the victory. We know we have forgiveness. We know we have the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Let us go forth from here boldly and confidently in that knowledge and be shining lights for the Savior! Amen.
I preached this message on Sunday, March 23, 2025, at Mount View Presbyterian Church. I dealt with all four passages for the Lectionary for this Sunday.
Bearing Fruit…and the Cross
Lent is typically thought of in the Christian world as a time of sacrifice. Some people give up meat only to crowd into the numerous fish fries around town. Others might give up chocolate or coffee or caffeinated beverages or shopping or any number of other things that we might consider “vices” personally, but most of those things are not innately spiritual and may in fact make us a bit more difficult at times to live with if we haven’t had our morning cup of Joe. I’m teasing you a bit, of course. But if Lent is supposed to bring us some spiritual benefit, then shouldn’t we be giving up things that can damage our relationship with God? Why not give up greed, pride, selfishness, and other such things?
That seems to be the underlying theme behind our passages today. They might be summed up by John’s exhortation when he was preaching in the wilderness in Luke 3:8: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” In other words, bear fruit while you’re bearing the cross. In our passage from Luke 13 this morning, Jesus seems to be addressing the thought that some had that bad things only happened to bad people. But the circumstances of our demise do not determine our eternal destiny. In spite of the untimely and unfortunate deaths of the Galileans and those in the tower of Siloam, Jesus says the important thing is to repent and be ready.
Jesus switches to talking about the fig tree that won’t bear fruit in the next few verses. The owner of the fig tree wants to cut it down because it’s unproductive. But the vineyard manager said “Give me another year and I’ll have it bearing fruit.” But the connection here with the previous verses and John’s statement about producing fruit in keeping with repentance is unmistakable. If we’re not bearing fruit, that could affect our salvation and our relationship with our Savior. Jesus said in Matthew 7:20: “By their fruit you will recognize them.”
Paul talks about the quality of our works in 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, but he doesn’t use the language of “fruit.”
12 If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. 14 If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. 15 If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.[1]
God, being full of grace and mercy, leaves us a way out when we fall short. That’s what he accomplished through Jesus in his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. But instead of focusing on these warnings for the rest of my message this morning, I want to turn the focus around to the theme I mentioned earlier: How do we bear fruit while bearing the cross? That would have been my sermon title in the bulletin if I had remembered to click send on my e-mail to Judy!
I want us then to look at the other three passages from the lectionary today in addition to our gospel passage I touched on at the beginning. In Psalm 63, we’ll look at seeking God in worship. In Isaiah 55, we’ll look at seeking God for our wellbeing. And finally in 1 Corinthians 10, we’ll look at standing firm in our faith to recognize the way out of temptations that can drag us down.
Let’s look at Psalm 63. For a long time our country has been turning away from church attendance and, by implication, from God altogether. A trusted, unbiased Web site called Statista has this summary of church attendance: “According to a 2022 survey, 31 percent of Americans never attend church or synagogue, compared to 20 percent of Americans who attend every week. Despite only about a fifth of Americans attending church or synagogue on a weekly basis, almost 40 percent consider themselves to be very religious.” A 2024 survey by Gallup puts the number of weekly attenders at 20%, with another 9% at “almost every week.” On the flip side, 31% NEVER attend church or other religious service. We could talk about the reasons for this 24/7 for a week, but we’d probably never get anywhere. Psalm 63 tells us why this shouldn’t be, though.
We should be able to come to church to find God. Granted David, who wrote this psalm, had a special relationship with God that enabled and empowered him to be a great leader of his people, but this doesn’t mean that you and I don’t have access to this same relationship in the New Covenant era. David claims to have seen God’s power “in the sanctuary.” It’s not clear exactly what he “saw,” whether it was some physical manifestation of light, a divine presence, or if he’s using the word “see” to describe what he experienced in worship. Regardless, it was clear at least in David’s day, one of the best places to be to encounter God was the sanctuary in the Temple.
In the New Covenant era, God has given his Holy Spirit to each of us who believe. You don’t have to be a king or a prophet any more to have exclusive access to the Holy Spirit. When we come together to worship, to sing praises and hymns, to read God’s word and hear it explained in such a way that it’s relevant to our live and our situations, the Holy Spirit works among us to build and shepherd that unity we have in body of Christ. When we pray together as a congregation, we let God know that we still trust in him to work in our lives and provide for our needs while at the same time letting those whom we’re praying for know that we will support them however we can. When we come together as a worshipping community for projects and collection for the poor, we show and shower God’s love upon those who are truly in need.
But our worship doesn’t just happen in the church building. Verse implies that wherever David is at, he is earnestly seeking God. Later in vs. 6, he say he remembers God in his bed and while he’s keeping watch on the battlefield at night. He sings to God and he clings to God, knowing that God’s presence is always with him through the Holy Spirit. We have that same assurance. Jesus even promised that at his ascension: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Seek God and you will find him, and as you draw closer to him, others will come to see him at work in your lives as well.
As we seek God, we can also know he will provide for our basic needs and do so generously. That is the message of Isaiah 55. Verses 1 & 2 go like this:
God wants to richly bless us. God’s goodness is genuine and original. God isn’t giving us yesterday’s leftovers. Jeremiah says “His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness!” (Lamentations 3:22b–23). Sometimes we spend a lot of effort and money pursuing things that don’t bring lasting or eternal satisfaction. God wants us to focus on him and what he provides for us. Later on in Isaiah 55, the prophet says this:
6 Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
7 Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
You heard in that passage the idea I suggested earlier about giving up the things that tempt us to turn from God. But Isaiah also says we need to get rid of the “stinkin’ thinkin’” as well. This is complete repentance: not just changing our behavior but changing our minds and our ways of thinking as well. That’s were the worship comes in from Psalm 63: setting our hearts on Christ.
One of my favorite passages occurs a few verses later in Isaiah 55:
I believe this is one of the greatest passages on evangelism. I love that it says God’s word accomplishes the purpose for which he sent it. When I was preaching early in my career, I was never in a church that followed the lectionary or the liturgical calendar. I could preach on what I wanted or I could pick out a theme or a particular book and prepare a sermon series.
But following the lectionary puts these two verses from Isaiah in a new light for me. Now I don’t know who decided on the three cycle of passages to read, but the lectionary is a “reading plan” adopted by many churches and denominations around the world, so it carries a lot of weight and, aside from the denominational differences and nuances that work their way into sermons on these passages, many churches are on the same page when it comes to what their congregations are presented with each Sunday. Because so many churches have agreed to use it, I believe it’s something that God honors. I think there’s something divine about the spiritual foresight those responsible for developing it, so I honor that.
Occasionally I’ll look at the passage for the day and wonder, “How am I going to preach on that?!” But I trust that there’s some component of God’s timing there, that is, some spiritual benefits he has in mind for sending out his word in this way, and I want to be faithful to communicate that in a way that’s relevant to you and my larger audience on the blog. I genuinely believe the lectionary is one way that God’s word gets from his mouth to our ears and that preachers who follow the lectionary are in many and diverse ways fulling the purposes for which God sends it out in that structure.
Finally, I want to look briefly at 1 Corinthians 10. Paul concludes in the first half of chapter 10 that that the written history of God’s people is intended for our encouragement and exhortation to faithfulness. Here’s what vv. 11–13 say:
11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come. 12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! 13 No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.[5]
Paul warns us that we shouldn’t rest on our laurels. Faithfulness is an active, ongoing process in the life of the Christian. There is nothing passive about it. Continue seeking God in worship; continue reading his words to hide them in your heart. Continue loving your neighbor as yourself so they too can see the love of God. Continue putting on the armor of God each and every day so you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.
May the power of the Holy Spirit go with you this week as you serve our Lord and Savior. Amen.
Sunday Morning Greek Blog 