Lent 5A: Heartache, Miracle, Invitation

John 11:1-45 Dear Partner in Preaching, Once again we’re offered – or faced with, depending on your mood 🙂 – a really, really long story from the Gospel According to John. As with the earlier stories, it can be both helpful and effective to focus on a particular detail to help hearers enter the story as a whole and experience its evangelical force. This week, however, I was struck by the dramatic movement of the story and how following that movement can offer us an opportunity to take stock of, and participate in, God’s ongoing and dynamic action in the life of our congregations. There are, I think, three major movements to this...

3. Mark 14:3a

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper…. Simon the Leper. Truth be told, we don’t know much about Simon the Leper. He is mentioned only in Mark and Matthew (26:6-13). There is a Simon the Pharisee in Luke’s story who also hosts Jesus for dinner when a woman anoints Jesus...