In this week’s Gospel text, the piercing hyperbole about family and discipleship normally receives top billing homiletically. However, I am newly struck by Jesus’ words regarding building a tower.
Jesus offers his unsolicited advice fully aware of the jousting for prominence that occurs in our social spaces. He sees our mad dash to the front row so that we can be seen by the chief executive officer, the potential major donor, or the bishop.
The unnamed woman’s healing in this week’s Gospel reading is a story of expansion, revelation, vision widened by grace. There’s more to the story, however.
Hope is the content of faith. Hope is the adopted son, the grafted inheritor. If there are to be, as with Abraham’s descendants, innumerable stars and grains of sands, it will be through this boy.
What is the point of prayer? The question is writ large in the texts from both the Hebrew scripture and the Gospel for this Sunday. The terrain is fraught with places to trip and fall.
God’s experience of hospitality—in the mysterious travelers and in the person of Jesus—inspires us to think beyond an Abraham-vs.-Sarah or Martha-vs.-Mary divide.
How do we respond to the issues that trouble people deeply? Jesus and the lawyer have a proper debate, but the lawyer continues to wrestle and cannot let go.
Jesus sends his disciples out “like lambs in the midst of wolves.” We live in a time when intimacy is erased, privacy laughable, rhetoric rude and rusty. The notion of going out as lambs to wolves is apt, even if the wolves and lambs may be interchangeable.
When I read this week’s passage from Luke, I take an aerial view. My perspective shifts from the disciples to Jesus, then to Simon the Pharisee, then to the bystanders, and finally to the woman who washes Jesus’ feet.