Lection and Liturgy

In my first post on Luke , I noted how important Jerusalem was for the way he tells his story. The story begins in Jerusalem with Zechariah’s temple service, and ends there too with the disciples in the temple praising God. From the time of the transfiguration, Luke talks of Jesus journeying to Jerusalem, arriving there on that first Palm Sunday. And in his second volume, Luke tells the story of how the good news is carried from Jerusalem at the beginning of the story, to Rome, the heart of the empire, at the end. The story of the transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36) is a key moment. Unlike the other gospels, Luke provides some content for Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah during the transfiguration. This story in all three synoptic gospels should be read as owing much to the literary genre of apocalyptic: a conversation with heavenly figures that (explicitly only in Luke) reveals the significance of what is happening in history. While all three synoptic evangelist...

If it wasn’t for the names of the biblical books, the title of this piece could look awfully like a contemporary headline. Yet in many other respects, neither Ezra nor Nehemiah feel particularly relevant for the contemporary world. Perhaps that’s why only one reading from these books crops up in the Sunday lectionary. Gustave Doré’s woodcut of the scene (1843: Public Domain) He imagines Ezra as a second Moses with stone tablets, rather than the scroll described in the story. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are heavily edited stories relating various aspects of how things went when people began returning from exile to the land they still saw as the focus of God’s promises. Although the books have been written together on a single scroll, and are therefore often treated together, it remains a matter of much speculation among historians and biblical scholars how they (and their different parts) interrelate. 1 These books are concerned with the restructuring of society, in ...