Three Year Banquet Worship Matters

The Lectionary for the Assembly

Gail Ramshaw

• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780806651057
• eBook ISBN: 9781451408171
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

A Three-Way Banquet is a concise, clear, straightforward introduction to the way that Christian communities have organized their reading of scripture in worship. The Worship Matters Studies Series examines key worship issues through studies by pastors, musicians, and laypeople from throughout the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Features include the following: 1) Informal and insightful writing for all readers; 2) Study questions at the end of every chapter; 3) Examination of vital issues in weekly worship; 4) Increased ability of leaders and congregants to understand and experience worship more richly.

4

How Do Four Gospels Fit into Three Years?

The four gospels

At the banquet that is the three-year lectionary, the main course is the gospel reading. Each Sunday the church assembles to celebrate the resurrection. But to do this we do not need to read only the accounts of Easter Day over and over each week. The church has maintained throughout the centuries that the gospels in their entirety proclaim the life of Christ for the world. Christians believe that since the word of God is a living reality, Christ actually does come into our midst when the gospel is read. The word of Christ is here among us now. So we use the etiquette common in the Western world, that when someone important enters the room, we stand. We rise for the gospel reading, and we surround the reading with the singing of alleluia.

The Western medieval lectionary functioned somewhat like a children’s Bible, in that it blended the four gospels together into one single narrative. Any discrepancies in the gospel accounts were ignored. The unity of the scriptures was valued more highly than the distinctive theology of each part. However, the three-year lectionary presents a different pattern: John at the major festivals, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke in successive years. The hope here is that we come to value each evangelist for his specific theological emphasis. (Probably the evangelists were all men, although even their names come down to us only by tradition; none of the four books is signed or dated.)

Many Christians are curious about when, how, and why the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John came to be selected out of all the many first- and second-century gospel narratives to become part of the canon of the church. Unfortunately, our questions can have no precise and complete answers. Whatever committee meetings occurred in the first and second centuries did not keep minutes. We do have a discussion from about the year 180 by a prominent bishop named Irenaeus, however, about the four gospels, why there are four, and what is the distinctive message of each.

The bishop’s position was that each Christian community needed all four gospels, not merely one of them, in order to hear the whole truth of Christ. For example, he says that those groups who used only Mark’s gospel would stress too much Jesus as a suffering man, and those who relied solely on John’s gospel would end up “totally in error.” Some of Irenaeus’ arguments strike us as quite alien to our way of thinking. He states, for example, that there must be four gospels because there are four corners of the earth. The church, he claims, needs four pillars. However, his primary discussion of the four gospels finds resonance with those contemporary Christians who have somewhere in their liturgical art the biblical depictions of the winged man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle.

These four images are cited in one of the visions in the book of Ezekiel. Probably the Jewish visionary borrowed them from neighboring religions that imagined such mythical beasts as guarding the divine throne in the heavenly sphere. Later, in the book of Revelation, the Christian visionary John uses these images once again. What most contemporary English Bible translations call “the four living creatures” are seen surrounding the heavenly throne, praising God for all eternity. Irenaeus writes that these four beings are the four evangelists. Because Matthew begins with the human genealogy of Jesus, Irenaeus states that Matthew is the winged man. Because Mark 1:2 refers to Isaiah’s prophecy, Christ is seen as coming with prophetic power, and so Irenaeus calls Mark the lion. Because near the beginning of Luke we encounter the priest Zechariah, the ox, as a victim of sacrifice, represents Luke. The eagle depicts John, who soars on high on the wings of the Spirit.

One of the finest features of the lectionary is how very much of the four gospels are proclaimed over the three years. During year A we get to know Matthew very well, and perhaps we are glad to encounter the different nuances in Mark when we arrive at year B. But those Christians who worship only at festivals will hear more John than anything else, and we ask first why John enjoys first place.

The Gospel of John

Irenaeus says that John is the eagle, soaring highest in the Spirit. Many Episcopal churches have recalled this imagery when they designed their lectern as a great bronze eagle, as if the entire Bible rests on the back of John. There is a way that this is true for Christian doctrine as a whole.

Christians continue over the ages to work out answers to the question Jesus posed the disciples: Who do you say that I am? Each of the New Testament authors—the evangelists, Paul, the author of Hebrews—has a somewhat different answer to that question. As decade after decade the early church reflected on who Jesus was, its theology deepened. A theologian would say that the Christology—the way the gospel writers portray Jesus and what they emphasize about him—went from lower to higher. The “highest” Christology in the New Testament, that is, the book that expresses most fully the divinity of Christ, is in the book of John. John was most likely the last of the four canonical gospels written, probably about the year 95. If the book of John had not become one of the four pillars of the church, Christology, our understanding of who Jesus is, may well have developed in a different way than it did.

Often in John, Christ is described as fully divine. One example of this is how the evangelists deal with Jesus’ birth. Mark presents no information about Jesus’ birth. Both Matthew and Luke record ways that his birth was extraordinary since he is the son of God. However, the prologue of John (1:1-18) states that the Word was God: Christ is not only born the son of God, but is God from before time. Another example concerns the early Christian memory that Jesus talked about the destruction of the temple. In Mark 14:58, at Jesus’ trial, he is accused of claiming to destroy the temple and build another. It is not clear, from Mark’s account, why this claim would have been so significant. Was Jesus a revolutionary leader, bringing in God’s new age, or simply a crackpot, making incendiary remarks? Penned several decades later, John’s gospel interprets the temple statement in this way: “But he was speaking of the temple of his body” (2:21). The focus has moved, from a memory of the sayings of Jesus to the Christian conviction that Christ himself is the temple.

Because of the Christian belief in Jesus Christ as God incarnate, it is appropriate that on the most important festivals, the gospel reading comes from John. The framers of the lectionary suggested that at the major Christmas service, the gospel would be the magisterial proclamation of John 1, and that at a secondary service the narrative of Bethlehem from Luke 2 would be read. For those churches that do not hold their primary service on Christmas Day, perhaps some combination is possible: Luke 2 read at a procession to the crèche, and John 1 as the gospel for the service. In the passage from John, Christ is proclaimed as the Word of God from before time and, at this time of the winter solstice, as the light of the world. Again, for the great three-day celebration of Easter—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter—the gospels come from John. Nearly all of the gospels during the weeks of Easter come from John. The Pentecost readings for all three years come from John.

The Sundays in Lent in year A present the gospel of John at its best. The early centuries of the church saw Lent as a time to prepare for baptisms, and we have several sets of sermons and catechetical lectures presented by the church fathers in which the long narratives from the book of John are applied to baptism. The framers of the lectionary assumed that increasingly Lent will be reconnected with baptism. Not only are more parishes reviving the ancient practice of conducting baptisms at the Easter Vigil, but for all baptized Christians, Lent can be understood as a return to the font, an annual renewal of the baptism that was our entry into the resurrection of Christ. The gospels in year A accentuate this baptismal focus, and Christians are encouraged to study the readings of year A during each season of Lent.

The first of these Johannine Lenten narratives, appointed for the second Sunday in Lent year A, is John 3:1-17. Nicodemus seeks out Jesus at night, inquiring about the new birth that comes from God. The church has used the imagery of John 3 to liken baptism to the waters of the womb and the sacrament itself to a second birth, a birth “from above.” On the third Sunday in Lent is the narrative of the woman at the well from John 4. Here Christ himself is seen as the water that we need, the living water that we drink so that we may live. On the fourth Sunday is the narrative of the man born blind. The early church called baptism enlightenment and used this story as a metaphor to describe our baptism as the light that calls us from darkness into Christ. Jesus instructs the blind man to wash away his blindness in the pool of Siloam, and the church has used this pool as yet another metaphor for the waters of baptism. On the fifth Sunday in Lent, the narrative is the raising of Lazarus. As Augustine proclaimed when preaching on this text, we are all dead in our sins. (Some of us are already stinking in our graves, he said!) In baptism we, like Lazarus, are brought back to life. Where is the water in John 11? Perhaps in the tears of Jesus we see another metaphor for the baptismal mercy of God.

The Gospel of Matthew

The three-year lectionary employs two different techniques in assigning biblical passages to Sundays and festivals. Sometimes a section is chosen from the Bible because it is particularly appropriate to the liturgical calendar. So, for example, we read the story of the Jerusalem palm procession on Passion/Palm Sunday as we parade around the church with our palms. The other technique is called semi-continuous reading. On these Sundays, units from the gospels are chosen more or less one after another, as if we are reading straight through the book. The semi-continuous technique is used throughout much of the year for the gospel selections, Matthew during the year A, Mark during year B, and Luke during year C.

The gospel of Matthew was written with an especially Jewish audience in mind. Repeatedly the evangelist quotes from the Old Testament, in an attempt to demonstrate that Jesus is the one expected by the Israelite tradition. He is the fulfillment of the promises made by the prophets, the Messiah born of the Davidic line of royalty. Moses was the mouthpiece of God in ancient times, and now Jesus is the new Moses who speaks the word of God for all time. Most biblical scholars think that the evangelist had a copy of Mark’s gospel and cited it extensively, since sometimes the book of Matthew is word-forword the same as the much shorter book of Mark. Yet Matthew, probably in deference to his Jewish readers’ reticence with the name of God, always changes Mark’s phrase “the kingdom of God” to read “the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew’s gospel emphasizes the ethical life that is expected of those who follow Christ. This corresponds with a Jewish sensibility. For Jews, the Torah is the law graciously given by a merciful God to seal a covenant between the divine and the human. The law assists the individual and the community toward a godly life, since it makes clear how we are to live. Although God is merciful, God is also the judge. The gospel parable often called “the last judgment,” in which the judging king inquires whether the sheep and the goats have lived in compassion and with justice, is found only in the book of Matthew.

For Matthew, Jesus is the ultimate Moses. Just as Moses preached long sermons to bring God’s word to the community, so does Jesus. What we call the “Sermon on the Mount” takes three chapters of Matthew’s gospel, and parts of it are slotted over six Sundays in year A. This sermon stresses that disciples are called to live even more righteously than their Jewish ancestors. “Be perfect,” says Jesus. The lectionary assigns this sermon to the early part of the liturgical year, January and February, after Christmas and the Baptism of Our Lord. The idea is that in our baptism we join with Christ to live the new life of the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew is concerned about how the community will cohere in a new organizational structure, and so this gospel stresses the importance of Peter’s leadership. The gospel from Matthew 18 lays out rules for church discipline. Yet the evangelist seems to have believed that the world’s end was imminent and that to enter into the kingdom of heaven, believers must live a life worthy of their faith. During September and October of year A we hear Matthew’s stern parables and allegories about the end of time and the requirement that we shape up. There is always, Matthew reminds us, “outer darkness,” where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. As the baptized community listens to Matthew, we are called to take seriously the new life of faith, to live out the resurrection in everything we do.

The Gospel of Mark

Most biblical scholars judge that the gospel of Mark was the first one written of the four. It is the shortest, and several times the lectionary borrows gospel readings from John in order to fill out all the Sundays of the year. Probably written about the year 65,Mark portrays Christ as the hidden Messiah. Repeatedly Jesus tells people not to tell others who he is. Those who we might assume would know a good deal about religion—the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Why Use a Lectionary?
• What Is the Revised Common Lectionary?
• What Is the Liturgical Year?
• How Do Four Gospels Fit into Three Years?
• Why Do Christians Read the Old Testament?
• How Are the Epistles Assigned?
• How Does the Lectionary Affect the Entire Service?
• How Does the Lectionary Affect the Entire Assembly?
• Bibliography