From the Lectionary for 28 September 2025 (Proper 21C)

Luke 16:19-31 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house - for I have five brothers - that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

~

"If we were to use a modern tale that fits, I would suggest Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It helps to bring out the fictional aspect of the parable. Because Dickens told this moving tale, we don't now believe in ghosts, nor that they forge chains in life by neglect of the poor. Because Jesus tells this parable, though, many people somehow come to believe that he is giving us a true picture of the afterlife. No, just as for Dickens, Jesus tells us a story of the future afterlife not to give us a true picture of that life but rather to move us to different choices in the present life."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from 'Reflections and Questions' on Luke 16:19-31 (link in comments below)

~

"It is very like a well-known folk tale in the ancient world; Jesus was by no means the first to tell of how wealth and poverty might be reversed in the future life. In fact, stories like this were so well known that we can see how Jesus has changed the pattern that people would expect. In the usual story, when someone asks permission to send a message back to the people who are still alive on earth, the permission is granted. Here, it isn't; and the sharp ending of the story points beyond itself to all sorts of questions that Jesus' hearers, and Luke's readers, were urged to face.

"The parable is not primarily a moral tale about riches and poverty - though, in this chapter, it should be heard in that way as well. If that's all it was, some might say that it was better to let the poor stay poor, since they will have a good time in the future life. That sort of argument has been used too often by the careless rich for us to want anything to do with it. No; there is something more going on here. The story, after all, doesn't add anything new to the general folk belief about fortunes being reversed in a future life. If it's a parable, that means once again that we should take it as picture-language about something that was going on in Jesus' own work.

"The ending gives us a clue, picking up where, a chapter earlier, the story of the father and his two sons had ended. ‘Neither will they be convinced, even if someone were to rise from the dead'; ‘this your brother was dead, and is alive again.’ The older brother in the earlier story is very like the rich man in this: both want to keep the poor, ragged brother or neighbour out of sight and out of mind. Jesus, we recall, has been criticized for welcoming outcasts and sinners; now it appears that what he's doing is putting into practice in the present world what, it was widely believed, would happen in the future one. ‘On earth as it is in heaven’ remains his watchword. The age to come must be anticipated in the present."

- N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone, pp. 200-01

~

"...[T]he divide between Lazarus and the Rich Man remains the final motif. “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” The essential point is that the rich man is the one who creates the divide, so that those on Abraham's side of the chasm who “might want to pass” (i.e. act out of compassion) in fact cannot. The text clearly implies that the rich and privileged, those with status, create the divide, not God. Thus the parable is not a picture of medieval hell but of humanly created alienation and its suffering. Again the way to the kingdom is through our relationships with others, forgiveness, and care for the poor. What we do in this world constructs the way we relate to God's kingdom."

- Anthony Bartlett, Seven Stories, pp. 90-91

~

"What I'd like to do is to bring out something very surprising about these three parables, which is how much they have in common and how much perhaps they were originally intended to be read together. It's one of the things I think we'll notice as we work through today's [reading] is to see how how often it refers back to things in the previous two parables, that's the one usually called The Prodigal Son and the one usually called The Unjust Steward. And curiously, one of the hidden but real presences there is the notion of stewardship. Just last Sunday remember the whole question was how did the steward exercise his stewardship. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the first son having managed to [...] squander his inheritance and then sought to come back on the same terms of reference as if he were a hard servant, so being like a steward, whereas the eldest son had acted like a steward rather than like a son, didn't seem to have realized that everything that he had was his. And as we'll see today a rather surprising steward turns up in in this week's in this week's gospel.

[...]

"Now we're used to the story of the rich man and Lazarus, so we're used to the name Lazarus, but if we were to listen to the story in Hebrew or Aramaic he would be called Eliezar. [...] It says he was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. Why? Well, because Eliezar was Abraham's steward. In [Genesis 15] Abraham, before he gets any children, he complained to God saying listen I've got no one to leave my household to except my steward Eliezar, he's the nearest thing to an heir, a descendant, I've got so everything's going to be his. And God says, don't worry you'll get a descendants. [...] And then of course also the steward is sent out again to help Isaac get a wife. [...] So Abraham's steward [is] an angelic figure and indeed was taken to be a such in Jewish popular tales of the time. [...] So strangely what we have here is there has been an angel at the rich man's door without him being aware of it, and has been carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.

[...]

"I think there's something even more subtle going on here. The sign, something happening, a dead man being raised, does not help you interpret the prophets and the law. Eliezar, as the poor man, that angelic presence, was already a hint of how you need to interpret the prophets and the law, from the position of the cast-out one. And of course it's only when Jesus is himself cast out and rises from the dead that he becomes, not simply, if you like, the fact of someone having risen, thereby shocking people into behaving, but actually the living interpretative principle of the law and the prophets, by which it might become possible for them to learn how to notice and respect and love the Lazaruses, the stewards of the Lord, who are sent and given to us as reminders of how real communication is created in this life when we learn to reach outside and beyond ourselves, and allow ourselves to be formed and transformed by the victims, the marginalized, the precarious in our midst."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6X-D8UUyGs)

[Source of Paul Nuechterlein, N.T. Wright and Anthony Bartlett quotes, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper21c/]

From the Lectionary for 21 September 2025 (Proper 20C)

Amos 8:4-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Hear this, you who trample on the needy,
    and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
saying, “When will the new moon be over
    so that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath,
    so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier
    and practice deceit with false balances,
buying the poor for silver
    and the needy for a pair of sandals
    and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

Luke 16:1-13 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

~

"Speaking to the Jewish leaders in Luke 15, Jesus uses unconventional figures to stretch their imagination toward forgiveness. Speaking to his disciples in Luke 16, Jesus now chooses more conventional characters who continue to live by the rules of debt-keeping according to ‘this present age.’ The rich man is not a stand-in for God, as the Prodigal Father is in Luke 15. No, this parable now plops us in the too-familiar setting of oppressive economics that yields a divide between rich and poor, and a few mid-level managers (stewards) in-between.

"We are not given the details, but this particular manager is not performing up to par and so he's fired, commanded to give a final accounting of his job-results. It is under these standard conditions of injustice - the conditions of this age - that the manager awakes to the light of debt-forgiving as alternative to the conventional world of debt-keeping. About to be demoted to the status of the oppressed, he at least acts to make friends among the oppressed. Even his master can see the wisdom of this and commends him. With nothing more to lose, the manager has made gains within his new community among the poor workers of the master's land."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from Opening Comments on the Girardian Lectionary page for Proper 20C (link in comments below)

~

"It is crucial, I believe, how one translates 'adikias' in vv. 8 & 9 - translated as “dishonest” in the NRSV and “unjust” (v. 8), “unrighteous” (v. 9) in the KJV. And it is used to modify a different noun in each verse. NRSV: “dishonest manager” in v. 8, and “dishonest wealth” in v. 9 KJV: “unjust steward” in v. 8, and “the mammon of unrighteousness” in v. 9 (which reflects the genitive construction in the Greek; more below).

"Many commentators in the English language go consistently with “dishonest” and base their arguments around that rendering. But there are potentially misleading aspects to not noting the possible variances in translating adikias - the singularity, in fact, of translating it as “dishonest.”

"First, I think it is important to know that the word in these verses is related to the crucial NT word group around the root dik: dikaioō, to justify, make right; dikaiosunē, righteousness, justice; dikaiōsis, justification, vindication. [...] I would argue that translating adikias as “unjust” or “unrighteous” is a choice more consistent with the rest of the NT.

[...]

"Let’s be honest: “dishonest” has very different connotations than “unjust.” “Honesty” is a very different thing than “justice.” For me, “dishonest” reflects primarily on the trustworthiness of individuals, whereas “unjust” is often used of systemic fairness. This makes a bigger difference in vs. 9 when paired with “mammon.” “Dishonest mammon” would generally involve a dishonest person. A dishonest person taints the wealth. “Unjust mammon,” on the other hand, could involve a person who seeks justice, but the wealth involved is still trapped in systemic injustice, tainted by the system."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from Exegetical Note #3 on Luke 16:1-13, on the Girardian Lectionary page for Proper 20C (link in comments below)

~

In his video homily for this week's lectionary (excerpt and link below), James Alison argues that the main context for this parable is usury, which was against Jewish law but which many lenders of goods found ways around to extract interest.  In particular, apparently the "going rate" in the time of Jesus for lending of olive oil was 100% interest (hence a loan of 50 jugs would require repayment of 100), and the rate for wheat was 25% (hence a loan of 80 containers would require repayment of 100).  If this is the case, what the 'shrewd' manager has done for the debtors is just to remove from their bill the 'unjust' interest they were being charged.

~

"Now again the phrase “dishonest wealth,” it's quite quite technical, dishonest wealth refers to that bit of the wealth which was dishonestly acquired, in other words the extra 25% in the case of the wheat or the extra 100% in the case of the oil. That was the dishonest bit. So [Jesus is] saying, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth: if you've got something that is dishonest, use it to make friends. That's the recommendation. If something has come to you dishonestly, you can't use it for yourself because that would be to confirm its dishonesty, you would be entering into the dishonesty of the thing. But you can use that which is of morally dubious status to do things for other people. And that's a way of making things good. [...]

"“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.” Now, interestingly, our dishonest servant turns out to have been faithful in his dishonesty. [...] Remember this. The next line then says, “If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you true riches?” Remember our servant was faithful with the dishonest wealth, he took the dishonest wealth and made things right with God by not charging usury, gave his boss a good reputation, and made friends. [...]

"“And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another who will give you what is your own?” Okay, now that comes back to all of us. Anything that we have is what we have been given. If we make things dishonestly, then, with just the little things that we can add on, then we'll be dishonest with everything. But if, starting with something which 'someone' has given us, like a rich master, we are then able to turn potentially dishonest things into something honest, we will be able to be given much much more.

"“If you have not been faithful with what belongs to another who will give you what is your own?” In other words, the notion is that we start having to learn how to be really shrewd in working out how not to be exploitative but how to make sense of what has been given to us, in order to put us in the position of receiving more. The more we give away the more we'll get, this is absolutely the pattern of desire which comes through in Luke's gospel.

"“No slave can serve two masters, he will either hate the one and love the other or will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” In other words the law of God, remember, is against usury, it's greatly in favor of generosity. And here the words love and hate in the first verse and then it says devoted and despise. Actually the word for devoted is “cleave” and the word for despise is the word used very frequently of those who reject God. So these are the words referring “cleave to God” or “despising God.” So what is he saying here? He's saying the true Master the one who gives you absolutely everything, is God, and if you cleave to him you will find out ways of making things which are apparently dishonest into honest things, which can do you good. Or you'll find yourself actually being really interested only in the financial outcome, in which case you will pursue dishonesty and you will make yourself dishonest.

"In other words, it's what's coming upon you that is really the question of your riches, not what you start with. What you start with of course is that which enables you to open up to what is coming upon you. If what is coming upon you is from God then you'll be able to grow in generosity. If what is coming upon you is for money then you will be a slave to it and it will run your life. That seems to me to be what is being said in today's Gospel."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH22kSULodE)

[Source of Paul Nuechterlein quotes, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper20c/]

From the Lectionary for 14 September 2025 (Proper 19C)

Luke 15:1-10 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

[Note: The Roman Catholic lectionary for Proper 19C includes verses 11-32, the so-called "Parable of the Prodigal Son."]

~

"I'd like to submit to you today that that is always the most essential act of repentance: namely, that we would change our minds about who God is. This is the first step, the key, to total repentance. In order to have one's whole life changed, I think that the first step is always to first have our minds changed about who God is.

"We need to know to the bottom of our hearts that the true God has always been a merciful God. It is we human beings who make God out to be someone else, to be a punishing, wrathful, violent God. It is we who are wrong about God and need to change our minds. Isn't that the very heart of the Christian Gospel? That through Jesus Christ we most truly get to see who God is?"

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from a sermon delivered on 30 September 1995 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper19c_1995_ser/)

~

"The first thing is Luke frames them very clearly. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying: this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So that's the background: Jesus is talking to a mixed group as so often of those who are normally regarded as bad, and maybe for good reasons, and those who think of themselves at least and maybe are officially appointed to be good and sometimes for good reasons.

"But what he's wanting to do in his answers is to completely alter the nature of their conversation about good and bad, and introduce something entirely different - the note of joy which is at the heart of the Gospel. Because each one of these three parables ends with the demand for a party, and ends with the demand for joy because anything to do with God ultimately is to do with joy."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (link below)

~

"A man with 100 -1 sheep cannot rest before he has restored the number to 100; the woman with 10 -1 coins is compelled to search until they are ten again; the man who had 2-1 sons cannot find joy until the missing one returns and they are two again. What is it, the meaning of this riddle?

"Clearly the numbers are important; each riddle puts them first, “There was a man who had 100 sheep” (vs. 4), a “woman who had ten coins” (vs. 8), “a man who had two sons” (vs. 11). Is this a clue? Yes it is! The riddle invites us to think about sets that are broken: the set of 100 is now 99, the set of 10 is nine and the set of 2 is 1. In each case there is something missing and the hole it leaves cries out to be filled.

[...]

"It now occurs to me that the Hebrew word “shalom” which is still the accepted greeting in Hebrew, cognate with the Arabic “salaam,” means “wholeness” before it comes to mean “peace.” This discloses that peace in our tradition means communal wholeness, and when I greet you with “shalom” I am saying, “I recognize you as part of the whole to which we both belong, and so there should be no rivalry between us. The Hebrew for “righteousness” (tzedakah) is another word for the state of “shalom,” that is, having been reintegrated after having been expelled. The “righteous” person is one who is in good standing with the community. The duty of the judge is to find ways to bring someone who, because of his deeds, has expelled himself from the community, back in.

"The Apostle Paul calls the work of God in Christ the “justification of sinners,” which means the restoring of those cast out, to standing in the community. For this reason he can say that those who believe in Christ and thus allow him to rectify (justify) their good standing in the human community, beyond the distinctions of religion, class and gender, are all one in their common humanity. Thus the healing of the violence-wracked world goes through the expelled and then reintegrated scapegoat – the social outcasts, the scoundrel sons, the smelly goats and the politely unacceptable. These are the ones God's kingdom desires most. [...]

"Note that the reintegration takes place before the outcasts are worthy of being welcomed back. Repentance is the decision to return, like the lost son, in order to be changed and restored by membership in the group. One does not change so as to re-enter the group; one re-enters the group in order to change. This is the very meaning of grace- the acceptance of the unacceptable. If it were otherwise it would not be grace but justice, not a gift but just desserts."

- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from sermon delivered on September 12, 2010 (source no longer available online)

~

"One does not change so as to re-enter the group; one re-enters the group in order to change." I would like to add that when one who is lost or outcast re-enters or is welcomed back into, the group, the group also changes. In Marilynne Robinson's novel Home, the returned 'prodigal son' sadly does not get the full, unequivocal, unconditional welcome of his father. And one of the main reasons for this, I think, is that the father, and to a large extent the rest of the family and their home community, are not willing to accept the unconventional and unsettling reality of the son. They are not willing to expand their horizons and to say that this one, too, is one of us, and belongs with us, because to do so would mean admitting that the 'us' as we define it is incomplete, limited, imperfect. The 'us' cannot truly receive the prodigal without a transformed vision and enactment of 'belonging'.

~

"[The] two small parables act as a very well-coded introduction to the longer one, and by well-coded I mean they're saying something about God as well because each one of the images is quite familiar to Jesus's audience. First of all the shepherd of Israel to whom many of the psalms are addressed, or "shepherd of Israel, hear us". Here is the shepherd of Israel saying what the activity of the shepherd of Israel looks like. The activity of the shepherd of Israel looks like going and finding a reason for rejoicing.

"And in the second story, we have the business of the ten silver coins. The most common reason why a woman might have ten silver coins is the dowry, it would be the sign of her ability to get married or indeed to have been married; [incorporated as] either as a bracelet or as a necklace, it would be a very important part of her life. It wasn't simply a that she was a numismatist and collected coins - no, these were a significant part of her bridal meaning. So what's happening? She's lost part of her bridal meaning and she goes and looks and finds it and rejoices. But what sort of rejoicing is this? - Israel the bride is rejoicing because the possibility of marriage comes alive again - the promise of marriage comes to fruition with Israel as the bride of God.

"And that's when we turn to the third of the parables - the one with only two people who might be lost or found: from 99 to 1, to 9 to 1, to one to one - two. And this is the key thing. And who is the representative figure for God here? Well, it's the one who I refer to as the self-effacing father because now that Jesus is coming down from mighty images to images of one to one, he brings out something astounding that rather than God being the judge between people who are good and bad, that God is a self-effacing father who never puts himself at a level above the two brothers. In fact, [he] effaces himself in the presence of the brothers so as to make it possible, if at all possible, for them to come together in common rejoicing.

[...]

"[T]he father says to [the older brother]: child - 'teknon' - you are always with me. He uses the word 'teknon', not son, as in our translation; it's a tender word but it's not the same as son, I think probably because it refers to the whole of Israel. And, “all that is mine is yours.” In other words, when we divided the property at the beginning I gave one-third to your brother and two-thirds to you, it's been yours all along. We've had it together, it's been yours to give and use. Your brother used it [dissolutely], you have used it in a withholding way. And you've used that to project yourself as better than your brother. But all that is mine is yours. “But we had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours” - [he] doesn't refer to him as my son - “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life. He was lost and has been found.”

"The great rejoicing. The self-effacing father doesn't want to get in the picture at all. His rejoicing consists in brothers separated by views of superiority, jealousy, moral differences, getting over all that, and coming to meet each other and rejoice. And what are we asked to do but to understand from Jesus that God is a great rejoicing. If only we can imagine that we can let go of our self-importance, our fear, our need to jump through hoops, and all that other stuff, and start to enter into the great rejoicing."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myI3tJbCbvw)

[Source of link to Paul J. Nuechterlein sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper19c/]

[Luke 15:11-32 (the so-called "Parable of the Prodigal Son") is also in the lectionary for Lent 4C (which I missed this year due to illness). I recommend James Alison's video "Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlWg-SNJX9I)]

From the Lectionary for 7 September 2025 (Proper 18C)

Luke 14:25-33 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now large crowds were traveling with him, and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

~

"The Greek word for “possessions” in vs. 33 is an interesting one. It is a participial noun 'ta hyparchonta', from the verb 'hyparcho', which is a compound word from the words hypo, “under,” archo, “to begin” (the noun 'arche' can also indicate power). It's not even listed in Kittel's TDNT, but the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lexicon has its most common meaning as: exist (really), be present, be at one's disposal. Things which are at one's disposal are one's possessions or means. BAGD also indicates that in Homeric Greek this word is often used as a substitute for 'einai' (inf.), the “to be” verb. I take it that this “really exist” is an intensive form of “to be.”

- Exegetical note by Paul Nuechterlein on the Girardian Lectionary page for this Sunday (link below)

~

"We could phrase this [...] by saying that the problem is not possessions but possessiveness. God gives us parents, children, siblings, and friends as gifts. Likewise we should give each ourselves as gifts to other people. The things we use in the world are likewise gifts from God and should be treated accordingly.

"The problem comes when we prefer to take other people and things rather than receive them. In such cases, the intensity of love we feel for others is actually possessiveness rather than love. We are told to “hate” parents, children, siblings, and friends so as not to be possessive of them."

- Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory's Abbey (Three Rivers, MI), from a blog post titled “God's Kingdom as Gift” (https://andrewmarrosb.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/gods-kingdom-as-gift/)

~

"So he's setting this out and then he says: So, therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your - the Greek word here is - I'm just going to get this right - hyparchousin - which can mean possessions but it actually means more: it means 'your being', 'your essence', any advantage you might have, your profit. So it means anything that profiteth, to use nice Jacobite language.

"So therefore none of you can become disciples if you do not give up anything that might give you an advantage: your very being, your possessions - everything. He's saying that the greatest strength, the strength of the Lord and his anointed, the one who is actually going to be able to fulfil the building of the new tower, is the one who is treated as nought by family, friends and children, and has lost all the things that hold him or her in being.

"This is a tremendously, as you can imagine, difficult teaching, saying: If you want to follow me, it's not a question of ‘I demand that you engage in pseudo-masochistic exercises’; it's that any leverage that gives you being now is going to get in the way of your being weak enough to conquer all these forces."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIvDVIem8I)

~

"[A] huge part of what Jesus came to do is to show us who God really is, which is ultimately Good News. But it is also challenging as hell, because we evolved with our own ideas of who god is. And they are surprisingly difficult to let go of. Today's challenging Gospel Reading gives us a big clue as to why.

"First, there's that matter of giving up possessions. Our usual human gods are the ones who bless us with good things when we are good and curse us with the loss or absence of good things when we are bad. These gods make sense of the world for us in terms of how we set things up, namely, as rewarding what's deemed as good behavior and punishing what's deemed as bad behavior. When we are deserving, God blesses us with good possessions. That's how our entire society is constructed, right? Working hard and getting what we deserve.

"Second, there's the matter of hating family. The blessing and curse thing works not only for individuals, but also for groups of people, for communities. God blesses or punishes us as a family, or tribe, or nation. God is our God, on our side. We count on our God to keep us safe against our enemies. In an us-and-them world, it is good to have God on our side. “God bless America!” Right?

"Does this God sound familiar? The God who is on our side and blesses us with good things, many possessions? [...] But I have come to believe that Jesus came to divest us of that human-made God and show us who God really is, and it's not that God.

"First, the true God of Jesus is the God of everyone, the God of the whole creation, so there is no us-and-them. There is only us. That's why Jesus said outrageous things like, “Love your enemies.” Because there is no us and them, there is only us. The true God is not the god behind any of the divisions we humans create. The true God is the one behind the oneness of everything, the God bringing all things into harmony through love. So we need to let go of all ideas tied to us-and-them thinking, including our family as separate from anyone else's family. We need to let go of mother and father, sisters and brothers, and receive all human beings as part of God's family, our family.

"And so God also doesn't go around blessing some and cursing others. The promise to Abraham and Sarah right from the beginning is that their family was to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1-3). It's supposed to be win-win, not win-lose. Again, Jesus makes this clear right from the start by beginning his ministry with the beatitudes in Matthew's Gospel: blessed are the poor, the meek, the grieving; and what we already heard from Luke's Gospel, a blessing to the poor, the sick, the oppressed.

"In short, Jesus is flipping things on us, declaring blessings for those in this world we usually count as cursed. Jesus is teaching us that God doesn't reward the good and punish the bad. We don't receive possessions because we deserve them; we receive them as gifts of God's graciousness. All of life is a gift! Not something to be possessed! So we also need to be able to let go of our possessions as possessions, and to receive them instead as gifts.

[...]

"I think coming to faith in God anew [...] is being able to experience one's possessions, even one's family, as pure gift. It is being able to survive death by being in oneness with all of life — and the ground of all life, God. Jesus, our big brother, came to help us grow-up into that life of grace, a way through the cross to resurrection. It is the experience of “eternal life” here and now because it is the experience of life as pure gift."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from a sermon by delivered on September 4, 2016 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper-18c-sermon-2016/)

[Source of Exegetical Note and links to Andrew Marr and Paul Nuechterlein sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper18c/]

From the Lectionary for 31 August 2025 (Proper 17C)

Luke 14:1, 7-14 (NRSV) Updated Edition)

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely.

[...]

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

~

"In the story from Luke Jesus wants those present at the dinner to recognize their internal ranking system and its' inherit problems. His story takes the form of advice on where to sit when entering a wedding hall. Since it's so hard to know how others see you and so difficult to accurately rank yourself, take the lowest place and then let the host move you up if the host sees you ranked differently than you have ranked yourself. This is much better than starting too high and having the embarrassment of being asked to move to a lower place. Jesus assumes there will be ranking but suggests an attitude of humility wherein the host determines your place rather than you grasping for it.

"In other words, don't worry about ranking. Leave that to the host and just enjoy yourself at the banquet. You have a place and it will be the right one since it is granted you by the host who sees you clearly. When everyone in a group isn't worried about ranking and trusts the host, a spirit of peace, contentment and harmony settles over the group. Instead of grasping for rank and honor trust that you have a place already. The greatest danger to you and to others is the discord that grasping produces. People who grasp will be brought low because they will misuse any rank they are given. In this way of interpreting Jesus' story, it's clear that we all have a place in God's love."

- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on August 28th, 2016 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Truby-Proper17-2016-Its-All-About-Ranking-and-Rivalry.pdf)

~

"Disgrace is shame; our old old duo which we get throughout the Gospel - shame and glory. The two are poles within which Jesus is teaching and [in which] the whole of the [imitative] understanding of humanity functions - shame and glory. “‘Give this person your place,’ and then in shame you would start to take the lowest place” (v9) - you would probably fall through the hole in the floor and slink away. [...] So Jesus says: “When you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you: friend move up higher. Then you will be honoured.” And again: what is the word for honoured? It's then you will have glory, then there will be to you glory in the face of all who are at the table with you.

"So shame, glory and he's teaching all this in this space which is a Pharisee's Sabbath party. In other words, he's turning this into a divine happening, in which the extremes of shame and glory are being taught about. And it's the judge who is present. Are they going to get that, in fact, the judge was present? It is actually showing them what shame and glory looked like. [...]

"And [then] we get a verse which is not in our reading, it's the next verse of the [Luke text], but which should be [part of the reading] because it's one of the dinner guests on hearing this said to him: “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God” [...] And this person has understood what Jesus is about. Jesus is undoing the Levitical instructions as to who gets to eat in the holy place at the banquet in the resurrection of the righteous. He's undoing that now in real-time. [...] [H]e's showing the guests at apparently a relatively secular banquet what might be the sign of the kingdom, the breaking in of the real feast where not those who are 'free from blemish', [but] those who are cast out can, in fact, join in the banquet of heaven.

"And one of the dinner guests has understood this. [...] I just wanted to bring out that someone gets what Jesus is talking about, someone understands that he is fulfilling and moving beyond Leviticus in talking about the Lord who invites, who has no favourites, and who breaks through all our reciprocities which are built on favour and fear of vengeance."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7TXK3dmzQ)

~

"The problem which Jesus raises with his listeners is the same question as we have seen in other circumstances: on which ‘other’ do I depend to be noticed and told “I like you”? I think that there are two possibilities: I can depend entirely on my peers, in which case my goodness, my striving to do well, and the sort of life I lead will be a reflection of them, and I'll have to do everything to keep myself well-considered by them, receiving those whom they receive and excluding those whom they exclude, so as not to run the risk of finding myself the excluded one. Not only all these things, which might seem superficial, like the little games of hypocrisy which we all have to play to keep our social life going, but it is also the case, perhaps without my realizing it, that all my “I” is nothing other than a construction forged by the difficult game of keeping my reputation. There is no other “I” at the bottom of it all, behind the “I” which I am acquiring through the little manipulations by which I search to keep my reputation. My “I” and my way of being related to the “other” are the same thing.

"The other possibility is that I receive my “I” from God, and here's the rub: God has an awful reputation. Which is nothing other than saying that God's reputation and the reputation of the victim are the same thing. That is what Jesus was suggesting: in order to receive your reputation, your being noticed and recognized, by God, you have to be prepared to lose the reputation which comes from the mutually reinforcing opinion and high regard of those who are bulwarks of public morality and goodness, and find it among those who are held as nothing, of no worth. That is also what Paul says to the Corinthians: God chose what is weak in this world to put to shame what is strong; God chose what is base and despised, even things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are. (1 Cor 1:27-28)

[...]

"[T]he order of this world has its own glory, which depends on mutually rivalistic imitation, and is a glory or reputation that is grasped and held onto with difficulty. Being enveloped in the order of this world prevents us from beginning to act in solidarity with those of poor repute, because if we do so we lose our reputation. But those whose minds are fixed on the things that are above, that is, those who have begun to receive their “I” from their non-rivalistic imitation of Jesus, already begin to derive their reputation from the Father and not from their peers. This they do in the degree to which, doubtless with much difficulty, they learn to give little importance to the reputation which people give them, and thus become free to associate with those who have no reputation, just like the one who was numbered among the transgressors.

"If they manage not to be ashamed of what the world treats as despicable, then, when the final revelation of the Son of man with angels appears, where it will be established beyond doubt who God really is, that is, the risen victim will be the central axis of all the life stories that are under construction; then, at that moment those who were little concerned about the loss of their reputation will receive an everlasting reputation: they will hear in the midst of a huge public what every little child wants to hear from its parents: “That’s right, little one, that’s what I wanted; I like what you’ve done.”"

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 180-183

[Source of link to Thomas Truby sermon and quote from James Alison's Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper17c/]

From the Lectionary for 24 August 2025 (Proper 16C)

Isaiah 58:9b-10; 13-14 (NRSV Updated Edition)

If you remove the yoke from among you,
    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
    and your gloom be like the noonday.
...
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
    from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the Sabbath a delight
    and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
    serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
    and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
    for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Luke 13:10-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

~

Exegetical notes (by Paul Neuchterlein, from the Girardian Lectionary page for this week - link in comments below):

1. “Eighteen,” the number of years the woman has been afflicted, mentioned twice, by Luke in vs. 11 and by Jesus in vs. 16. Numbers often provide background clues in ancient texts. In the James Alison essay “Inhabiting Texts and Being Discovered,” in Jesus the Forgiving Victim, he suggests a link to a story that would have been well-known to Jesus’ Jewish listeners: the story in Judges 3:12-25 of Ehud liberating the people of Israel from an eighteen year servitude under the Moabite king Eglon.

2. “Hypocrites” (hypocritēs in Greek, from the Greek words for “under” and “crisis”). This word is actually quite rare in Scripture, appearing only in the Synoptic Gospels (a favorite word especially of Mathew’s Jesus) and two places in the Book of Job. Once again, James Alison calls attention to the Joban texts as a likely background for Jesus’ use of the word. Particularly impressive in this context is the fact that the Job 36:5-12 passage talks about being bound in fetters and afflicted, much like Jesus sees this woman. Elihu is addressing Job about a God who answers the righteous who are afflicted, those who are “bound in fetters and caught in the cords of the afflicted.” But there are those who don’t hearken to God’s help that the Septuagint translates as the “godless (hypocritēs) in heart,” who hold onto their anger, and “they do not cry for help when he binds them.”

~

Another exegetical point is the connection between the Isaiah reading, "If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil" (58:9b), and v16 of the Luke passage: "a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years." Satan, or more correctly The Satan, is the accuser (the literal translation of "the satan", the inspiration of all who point the finger and speak evil of others.

Tom Truby highlights this dimension of the story:

"Could satan be a stand-in for the accusing community who says “You are just a woman. You were born to carry this burden. Don’t try to escape it.” Does this story have applications for any person or group of people our culture unfairly asks to carry our culture’s burdens: to be the ones in whom we store our resentment and who absorb our dysfunction?

"In this story from Luke Jesus comes along and sees a woman bent by her culture. He decides to set her free. Jesus has asked us to model ourselves after him. When we see someone bent, or perhaps a whole population bent, shaped by the weight they carry, even though it is not their burden, what should we do? Should we feel their plight and call out to them in identification? How can we place our hands on them so they can stand up and praise God?

"Jesus must have said all of this in such a clear way that all of them saw the connections. With things suddenly clarified, the opponents of Jesus felt ashamed—as they should. But they too are forgiven. Even as all of this happens, Jesus is on his way to the cross to make human forgiveness explicit. In exposing the mechanism by which their little village works they have been given a great gift; for though their leaders may not know it, they too are in bondage. They are in bondage to their need to keep their sister bent and to hide that from themselves. It keeps them from claiming their humanity as a forgiven people able to praise God."

- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on August 25, 2019 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Truby-Proper16-2019-The-Dark-Cloud-of-Human-Ignorance-and-Self-deceit-Cleared-for-a-Moment.pdf)

~

James Alison's essay “Inhabiting Texts and Being Discovered,” is specifically on this passage. With the two passages from the Hebrew Scriptures mentioned in the Exegetical Notes above in mind, Alison concludes:

"[Jesus] comes into the synagogue, which is supposed to be the gathering of Israel, and what does he find? Israel bound down in affliction, symbolized by this woman here with her eighteen years of suffering. But unlike the Israel of old, is anybody crying out to the Lord for delivery? Not a bit of it! In fact the synagogue leader is behaving much more like Eglon than like Ehud. Both he and those present have become godless in heart, hypocrites, since rather than cry out and actually long for help, they would rather sit complacently gnawing over their own affliction.

"But this is not what the real Israel is about at all! The real Israel cried out to YHWH for delivery, and in the absence of that, well then, YHWH comes into their midst to give the afflicted their right. “If they are bound in fetters, and caught in the cords of affliction, he declares to them their work … that they are behaving arrogantly.” [Job 36:8-9] So please notice that Jesus is even now enacting in their midst what YHWH does, rebuking them for their arrogance and their weddedness to resentment which leads them to fail to cry out. But he is also delivering the afflicted by her affliction, and opening the ears of all of them through her adversity. […]

"The overall dynamic is then of YHWH visiting his people in the midst of a synagogue meeting, so as to bring out what real Israel is really all about, as full of power and excitement as the sagas of old, showing them in three dimensions what it really is to be a child of Abraham. You can begin to get a sense then of how a synagogue full of people suddenly found itself hoicked out of its ordinary routine. All of its participants find themselves occupying different places within the stories, brought, if they could accept being urged to cry out more, to a real sense of what all the glories of Israel were really all about.

"These people were undergoing a visitation from YHWH, so no wonder they rejoiced “at all the glorious things that were done by him.” On the other hand, those for whom synagogue has become a Moabite cult, in which, as it says in the Book of Job, resentful people go down to their graves in shame because they don’t cry out, then, well, “his adversaries were put to shame.”"

- James Alison, "Jesus the Forgiving Victim", pp. 369-71

[Source of exegetical notes by Paul Neuchterlein, link to Thomas Truby sermon and quote from James Alison's Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper16c/]

From the Lectionary for 17 August 2025 (Proper 15C)

Luke 12:49-53 (English Standard Version)

“I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

~

"There is [...] one saying of Jesus that switches the whole meaning of fire and it gives an indication of how he was changing [John the Baptist's] entire symbolic scheme [of the fire of judgment]. He said, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:49-50).

"The image of setting fire to the whole earth is very different from [John the Baptist's metaphor of] burning the separated chaff. It is also connected to a baptism that Jesus has yet to undergo, and so is diverse from John's meaning. John's promise of a baptism with “spirit and fire” refers to the final cataclysm of God's in-breaking in history. The water baptism at the Jordan that he offered stood as a powerful symbolic alternative to fire, the possibility of entering into a repentance and purification that pre-empted this fearsome eventuality.

"Jesus' putting together of “fire” and “baptism” in respect of something he had still to undergo suggests that he accepted John's symbols but at a deeper and decisive level he opted to bring the crisis down on himself in a totally exceptional sense. He would thereby release fire on earth, but in a transformed, generative sense. Here we have the absolutely characteristic gesture of Jesus that unites an apocalyptic viewpoint with something else, something that changes the orientation and content of apocalyptic itself."

- Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian, pp. 233-34

~

"[H]uman desire, rivalry, competition, which had previously been kept in some sort of check by a system of prohibitions, rituals, sacrifices and myths, lest human groups collapse in perpetual and irresoluble mutual vengeance, can no longer be controlled in this way. This is the sense in which Jesus' coming brings not peace to the earth, but a sword and division. All the sacred structures which hold groups together start to collapse, because desire has been unleashed.

"So the sacred bonds within families are weakened, different generations will be run by different worlds, give their loyalty to different and incompatible causes, the pattern of desire constantly shifting. All in fact will be afloat on a sea of wrath, because the traditional means to curb wrath, the creation by sacrifice of spaces of temporary peace within the group, has been undone forever.

"The only alternative is to undergo the forgiveness which comes from the lamb, and start to find oneself recreated from within by a peace which is not from this world, and involves learning how to resist the evil one by not resisting evil. This means: you effectively resist, have no part in, the structures and flows of desire which are synonymous with the prince of this world, that is to say with the world of wrath, only by refusing to acquire an identity over against evil-done-to you."

- James Alison, Broken Hearts and New Creations, pg. 44

~

In his video homily for this week, James Alison makes a number of interesting connections and observations that subvert to some extent the usual interpretation of this passage:

- the "fire" to be kindled can be linked to the tongues of flame on the people on the day of Pentecost (Act 2); this fire is destructive in regards to the human way of violence, but is also generative of God's way of forgiveness and peace, as suggested also in the passage quoted just above from "Virtually Christian";

- the Greek work translated as "distress" (v.50) has a root of 'hold fast' or 'press together' so can be thought of as holding back of emotion, feeling constrained or compelled; hence it is not necessarily a 'negative' emotion but can be seen as related to Hebrews 12:2, "for the sake of the joy that was set before him."

- what is interesting about the number 5 is that it is the lowest number which can be divided in more than one way *unevenly*, so it draws attention to the way society normally divides to create peace: 4 against 1, not 3 against 2; hence Jesus' prophecy can be seen, in a way (this is my own extrapolation), as a prediction of modern democracy, where peace in society is not reached by the mob in unifying against a 'scapegoat' other, or by the one dictator imposing his will by force on the many (1 against 4), but instead reached through acceptance of the decision of the majority (slim as it may be) - an 'uncomfortable' peace, if we can even call it that, as we know too well these days.

- the familial antagonisms mentioned are notable as being democratic, two-way, which subverts the hierarchical antagonisms spoken of in Micah 7:6 (which Jesus is clearly alluding to), where it is the son, daughter, daughter-in-law, who are condemned for opposition to their elders.

Alison concludes:

"So the notion here [from Jesus] is: “I came to bring fire, I wish it were all kindled. How tough it is to constrain what I want to give until it is completed.” And what he wants to give is going to look to some awfully like wrath, but in fact it's the possibility of living without wrath in the midst of a world that is going to become visibly or apparently more wrathful. But we're going to know where the source of peace and unity, real peace and real unity is.

"And the challenge for us - and that's going to be the challenge we see in the next couple of passages in Luke is going to be - how do we interpret which side to be on? How do we interpret where the path to looking for real unity, a real togetherness, respecting all the differences between fathers/sons, mothers/daughters, mothers and daughters in law - all those real differences that are shown up by collapses in culture, collapses in generation, impossibility to keep fake unity together.

"So that I think is this week's challenge to remember that the gift of the Holy Spirit is the most destabilizing entrance of the Spirit, of the Creator, into our midst. It leads to a constant world of re-signifying, of making all things new, of working out how, in whatever space of disaster or catastrophe we are, as fake unity collapses, we can begin to usher in the new world."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmtBy0KnqGw)

[Source of quotes from Anthony Bartlett and James Alison's Broken Hearts and New Creations, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper15c/]