Good morning! I am officially back from my blogging vacation, at least for a few days. I’m heading to the great state of Washington for the Easter holiday this year (and doing a whole lot of wedding planning while I’m there—only 40 days!!!), so you’ll probably have some guest bloggers for Good Friday and the Monday following Easter. I’ve already lined up CoCo member Jennifer Ross to share with us on Monday about her activism on campus, so stay tuned for that.

This week I’ve decided to go a bit more Jesus-y on you. Because as most of you know, this week is Holy Week in the Christian calendar, the high point of our religious year. To do this, I wanted to go back to the lectionary and reflect on the Scriptures it lays out. For those of you following along at home, today’s lectionary passages are Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 36:5-11, Hebrews 9:11-15, and John 12:1-11 (which is a cool woman-centered passage about Mary anointing Jesus. Woo hoo!).

Okay, now I know what your next question is—what the heck is a lectionary? (Of course, maybe I’m the only one who would ask this question, since I grew up Pentecostal—some years, we were lucky if they even mentioned Christmas in my little church.) Well, my buddy Frank Quinn, OP, from the Catholic site I found on Google, says, “A lectionary is a choice of readings from the Old and New Testaments appointed for specific times and celebrations over the course of the liturgical year.”

Lectionaries have been part of the church almost from the beginning. Since the early church grew out of Judaism, and Jewish services included readings from the Torah and the Prophets during each Sabbath, the Christian church began to organize their worship around the chronological reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and the letters of the Apostles. The arrival of holy seasons such as Easter, though, meant that chronological readings gave way to a themed text for each service, based on the holy day. By the High Middle Ages (when all those hierarchical kings and popes wanted to centralize everything, including worship), all Western Christian churches were hearing the same set of Scriptures every Sunday.

Now, I will confess that from what I read online, our Protestant Reformed ancestors weren’t very gung-ho on the lectionary thing (although if you happen to be Lutheran or Episcopalian, your tradition pretty much kept the Catholic lectionary to some degree after the Reformation). Some of the Swiss Reformers, like Zwingli in Zurich, completely ditched the lectionary and observations of the church year. Calvin, from whom our Presbyterian branch springs, got rid of the Catholic lectionary and church year, but did set up a new continuous reading to keep the whole concept of unified worship.

So fast-forward to the 1970s, the height of the ecumenical movement. At that point, many of the mainline churches were using some sort of lectionary, and they decided to all get together and come up with a common lectionary for all participating denominations. The set of Bible readings we use today ultimately came from that effort—the Revised Common Lectionary. The PC(USA) uses this lectionary, as do the United Methodists, Episcopalians, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ, and Disciples of Christ.

The Revised Common Lectionary is basically designed to hit on most of the Bible in three year cycles. During the Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter sections, you’ll probably hear the same texts year after year, but during the rest of the year you’ll hear a variety of texts during worship. There is also a daily lectionary that allows you to go through most of the Bible in two years. You can get the daily lectionary on the PC(USA)’s Devotions and Readings page.

One more thing to note about the lectionary, as you may have noticed above—it is kind of long. Most of the time, it includes a reading from each of the following: the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Epistles of the New Testament, and one of the four Gospels.

But if you’re looking for a way to get through the whole Bible in a few years, and then come back for a refresher course, a daily lectionary may be the way for you to go. And during seasons like Lent and Easter, the lectionary continually draws us back to the story at the center of our faith—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.” --John 12:3

“Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.’” --John 12:7

Kelsey