The Lenten season and Holy Week recall gospel lessons and other passages of Scripture appropriate to the season, yet we need to ask if we read these sacred texts of “Old” and “New” Testaments with awareness of the history that has unfolded over the past two millennia.
Kenneth Jones’ recent play “Alabama Story,” set in Montgomery in 1959, reminds us to remember the past and live for a different future.
Scholar of the Psalms J. Clinton McCann suggests that the 23rd Psalm “be read and heard as a psalm about living,” placing the wisdom of the psalm squarely in the day-to-day world that we inhabit rather than the promises of a world yet to come.
As he prepared to be installed in his first pastorate, Martin Luther King said to his faithful flock, “Remember Christian friends we are now in the colony of time, but our ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity.”
The gospel plays out in a world well acquainted with the jailhouse blues, yet the Resurrection beckons with a different song, soaring above our longings and our loathing, above our angst in life and our cries in the night.