Home » New Testament »
John 12:20-33
Lent 5B
“Sir, we would see Jesus.” With all due apologies to the many pastors out there who need to be addressed as “Ma’am” and not “Sir,” those of us who preach in various churches have seen those words—lifted up out of John 12:21—emblazoned on pulpits, often on a small brass plate visible to the preacher alone. …
Hebrews 5:5-10
Lent 5B
This week’s Epistolary Lesson assumes that for a relationship to exist between God and God’s people, as well as among groups and between individuals, things must be repaired and restored. However, Hebrews 5 insists that the only way that can happen is if God does it. We’re sometimes angered to hear our various leaders reveal…
John 3:14-21
Lent 4B
This commentary originally appeared as my regular blog post on The Twelve on March 2, 2021. If you wish to see a slightly different take on this passage, you can click here to view my sermon commentary from 2018. Johnson&Johnson&Jesus If you have gone to most any news or newspaper website in the last…
Ephesians 2:1-10
Lent 4B
Grace is what my colleague Scott Hoezee calls “the dearest piece of good news the church has for the world.” It’s also, however, what he calls, “fiercely difficult to grasp.” After all, grace has always been a source of both deep comfort and frustration, of both joy and even controversy for Christians. Jonah, for instance,…
John 2:13-22
Lent 3B
We are impressed very often by all the wrong things. In John 2 everyone was impressed with the physical Temple. It had been undergoing construction for over four decades already and was not even finished. It reminds me of the Ken Follett novel The Pillars of the Earth that narrates the construction of a European…
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Lent 3B
In a wonderful sermon commentary on this text (from which I drew numerous ideas for this one), Scott Hoezee suggests that there’s a danger in spending as much time in church and around Christians as some gospel proclaimers do. That’s when Christianity becomes commonsensical to us. And we also wonder why Christianity doesn’t make sense…
Mark 8:31-38
Lent 2B
One reads of such terrible things now and then. Stories about the happy couple who had a magical wedding and then died in a plane crash on the way to their honeymoon. Or the man who just got the promotion he had been dreaming of but who gets hit by a bus on his way…
Romans 4:13-25
Lent 2B
Death continues to intimidate many people. As a result, most people will do almost anything to avoid or at least indefinitely postpone death. The Bible suggests that we’d even trade everything we have in exchange for an escape from death. We sometimes sense that many people believe that if we just didn’t have to worry…
Mark 1:9-15
Lent 1B
Lent begins in the wilderness. And it’s not a terribly safe place to be all things being equal. Some years ago after a seminar I was attending in Tucson, Arizona, wrapped up around the noon hour, my wife and I decided to check out a nearby National Park. We took a big bottle of water…
1 Peter 3:18-22
Lent 1B
It seems as though Peter nearly always returns to the cross. He constantly reminds readers that willingness to suffer for Jesus’ sake is based on the wonder of Christ’s willingness to suffer death on the cross for our sakes. So as the Church enters the season of Lent, it’s important to study I Peter 3….
Content related to New Testament