Sermon Resources for Lent and Holy Week Year B

The Year B Revised Common Lectionary is the year in the cycle that zooms in the most on The Gospel of Mark.  As we did not long ago on our Advent resource page, we will begin here with a review of this Gospel.

Many think Mark is the original Gospel to be written down and that Matthew and Luke knew of it and made use of it in composing their own Gospel accounts. After all, with the exception of just 30 verses (out of Mark’s total of 661 verses), all of Mark can be found in Matthew, Luke, or both. For Lent 2024 the first two Sundays take texts from Mark and then we return to Mark for Palm/Passion Sunday.  In between we spend some time in John’s Gospel (which does not get a dedicated RCL year but is scattered throughout each of the three years in the cycle).   For Easter Mark 16 is made the optional Gospel text, which is unfortunate as Mark’s quirky telling of the resurrection deserves to be preached on.   This page will focus its initial ideas on Mark 16.

One thing we preachers know about Mark is that his writing style is very spare—Mark wastes no words and, particularly in the first part of the Gospel, events take off with lightning swiftness, motored along by Mark’s favorite Greek adverb of euthus: immediately!  Mark was in a hurry to get the story of Jesus across. And if Mark’s Gospel begins very suddenly with Jesus just emerging from out of nowhere to be baptized by John, it ends with equal suddenness in Mark 16:8 as the terrified women flee the empty tomb, hurtling out into history like projectiles emanating from a terrific explosion. Mark ends in the silence of the women but the story could never have been told had they stayed silent. We know they spoke, we know they witnessed eventually. So must we all, Mark is telling us, so must we all.

Mark is also the Gospel that is clotted with misunderstanding about who Jesus is. No one understood him, no one got Jesus’ identity and nature right, and even Jesus himself is constantly asking for silence every time someone is ready to identify him publicly as God’s Christ. Jesus knew that only his death on the cross would unlock his true identity and so once he dies and then is raised again, the angel tells the women to go to Galilee to see Jesus. But as Donald Juel, Thomas G. Long, and Ched Myers remind us, that final instruction is also a cue to us readers: we, too, need to go back to Galilee, back to Mark 1 and then re-read the Gospel. Once we have been to the cross and come to understand the true nature of Jesus as Messiah, then we can re-read the whole story through new eyes.

Scholars have arrived at two, possibly related, schools of thought as to Mark’s purpose in writing this gospel the way he did. Some think Mark’s church had been persecuted and so was feeling discouraged. Others think that by later in the first century perhaps some churches had become a bit lethargic. Either way or both ways Mark presented a gospel designed to shake people up. Mark wanted to wake up the lethargic church and he wanted to boost up the discouraged church by writing a gospel that reminded them of the dramatic power that Jesus possessed and still possesses. Hold your heads up high, Mark is saying. Don’t be the least bit blasé about the gospel, Mark is saying. We are part of a grand drama shot through with tremendous power. Take heart!

As we continue in the year 2024, we do so in a world torn by war and, certainly in the American context, in a society riven by partisan divides so raw and so deep, violence seems lurking around all-too-many corners.  Now more than ever and in this Lenten Season, we need to let Mark race us along to come face to face with the Jesus whose identity and power we absolutely need to recognize and revel in.