The Lectionary and Scripture Interpretation for Lent
The season of Lent disrupts the liturgical year and the lectionary in many ways. Click here for more information on the season and its readings.
Overview and Connections
The first Sunday of Lent is always the reading of Jesus’ desert testing. The Old Testament reading speaks of ritual and stories, a theme through Lent. This culminates in the Easter Vigil, when we gather around a primeval fire and once again tell our stories. These two readings are hinged together by a reading from Romans which focuses on believing and confessing our faith.
The purpose of Lent is to prepare the people of God for the Paschal feast. So every reading invites us to ask: how can this reading help prepare me for the coming feast?
Deuteronomy 26:4-10
This reading tells us about an ancient ritual of offering harvest first-fruits to God. There’s an important pattern at work in this ritual: tell your story, make an offering, bow down. Another way to put it: recount your history; give what you can; acknowledge God as supreme.
Our life is full of rituals, big and small. Sometimes we call them routines because we discount their power. Think about the format of some of your rituals. What do you do, how do you do it, and why do you do it?
How might the pattern of this reading’s ritual influence some of your own?
Vv1-3 set the stage for us with the pattern:
- When you have come into the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you as a heritage, and have taken possession and settled in it (v1)
- Gather up an offering from the first fruits of the harvest (v2)
- And then go tell the priest that this offering acknowledges all the God has done for you (v3)
The offering was to be given to the priest, who served as the mediator between humanity and God. This indicates it was a ritual action. In v4, the priest is instructed on what to do, but then in v5, the worshipper has a part as well; he or she is not just a passive observer.
V5 begins the telling of the story, with instructing the person making the offering to say, “My father…” They are encouraged to embrace the whole story as their own personal history.
Addressing their “father” Jacob, they call him a wanderer. The actual Hebrew word means “ready to perish, about to die.” Some translations use the word refugee or even fugitive. This is someone at the end of their rope; all their resources are gone and they have nothing to fall back on. The lesson is that Jacob/Israel was saved when he was most vulnerable and had to depend on God for everything.
Embedded in this is the idea of anamnesis, a Greek word meaning “to remember.” But it’s far more than just memory. The easiest way to understand this word is to think about a smell, something that transports you somewhere else. For me, every time I smell black-eyed peas cooking, I am transported to my Granny’s kitchen, watching her stir the pot, tasting it, and giving me a taste. I am right there with her. It is more than memory; I become a part of the memory once again.
Anamnesis is what happens every time we celebrate the Eucharist; we are to remember it so deeply that we enter into it to find Christ truly present. The Jewish people experienced this any time they recounted the Exodus story – they entered into it. What Holy Week is to us, the Exodus is to the Jews: the greatest moment of salvation.
They continue to recount the story in vv6-9, speaking of it as though the event happened in their lifetime, as though they themselves experienced it. These verses also highlight a repeating pattern throughout the Biblical narrative: oppression, cry for help, divine action. The Egyptians oppressed us, we cried for help, God saved us. Vv8-9 particularly are of very ancient origin, and were probably a very old confession of faith, much like our Creed.
In the ritual action, the person tells their story in a way that makes it their own. In v10, the next step in the ritual is to make an offering. It is made before the Lord, or in God’s presence. At the end of the verse is the last part of the action: to bow down before God in worship.
This is just the beginning of the season of Lent, which is why the lectionary does not continue to v11. We don’t really want to emphasize celebration just yet! But there’s a promise in this verse that I think is important to hold on to in the days to come.
In what ways have you made the salvation story your own?
Romans 10:8-13
During Lent, all three readings stand alone, but the New Testament reading will often be sort of a “hinge” between the Old Testament and Gospel readings.
In the beginning verses of chapter 10, Paul is talking to people who want to try and earn their salvation by what they do. In v3 he says they were unaware of what God had already done and they did not submit to God’s work in them. In v8, Paul speaks of the simplicity of what is required by God: our submission. Not easy but very simple! His quote in this verse is from Deuteronomy 30:14.
V9 was most likely a baptismal formula. Today we say, “I baptize you in the name…..” In Paul’s communities, they might have said the words of this verse instead. The word confess is the Greek word homologeo – homo one or together, logo to speak. Confessing is something communal, something we do together as one.
Paul then expounds on that by saying it a little different way in v10. Our words are powerful, sacramental: they effect what they signify. Of course, we have to balance this with numerous other places where Paul stresses the necessity of right living.
V9-10 form a chiasm, which is a common Greek rhetorical device. Paul’s readers would have been familiar with this and would have understood something about it that we miss because we’re not trained in it.
A confess with your mouth v9 B believe with your heart B1 believe with your heart A1 confess with your mouth v10
For this type of rhetorical structure, it’s always what’s at the center that is most important. Paul is emphasizing here that it’s not externals but the internals that matter most: what we believe.
The NAB and RSV both use negative wording for v11. Most modern translations follow the actual Greek, saying something like “everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” This better suits Paul’s overall message of inclusion, as illustrated by the next verse.
In the Deuteronomy reading, part of the ritual was recalling how they had cried out to the LORD, the God of their ancestors, and another part of the ritual was you shall bow down before the LORD, your God. Paul reminds us in this passage of the power in calling on the name of God. This also provides a connection to the Gospel reading, as we see Jesus invoking that name to ward off temptation.
What does it mean for you to “believe in your heart” that Jesus was raised from the dead?
In what ways do you confess the gospel message, both as a part of a faith community and in your own words?
Luke 4:1-13
Every year on the first Sunday of Lent, we go through the temptation story from whatever gospel we’re reading – this year from Luke. You can tell from this account that Jesus’ testing took on more importance very quickly in the early Christian community. Mark pretty much glosses over it, but Matthew and Luke give a wealth of details. John’s gospel, written at the end of the 1st century, does not contain the temptation story per se. Rather, that gospel sprinkles testings throughout the narrative.
The setting for this story is the wilderness or desert. It is in a desert in the sense that it’s a solitary place with not many people around. The desert is traditionally a symbol of inward pilgrimage. The ancient desert monastics took this quite literally in their search for a deeper understanding of God. Imagine a desolate place, abandoned, uncultivated, a lack of population, no one around. The emphasis is on a lack of population more than lack of vegetation. The wilderness was not a romantic place. It was dangerous. It was also the refuge of bandits and the discarded of society. It was believed to be the abode of demons. And, most significantly, it was the place of Israel’s testing.
Jesus’ temptations revolve around three core things that still work on us today: self-satisfaction, power, and security.
Each test challenges Jesus to prove he is the Son of God. To each, he responds with a reference to a passage in Deuteronomy. One commentary described this book as “a great book of the Pentatuech that calls Israel to be a people of the covenant, to give their hearts to God, to trust that the God who led them out of slavery would continue to take care of them.”
These temptations are presented at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, but they are symbolic of the temptations Jesus faced throughout that ministry:
- To use his power for his own benefit
- To use his status to win the crowd for himself
- To ask the Father to do things according to what Jesus saw as best
We could summarize Jesus’ response as follows:
- My real food is God’s word
- The only one I worship is God
- I do not test God
Just prior to this scene, Jesus is in the area of the Jordan and is baptized by John the Baptizer. The passage after this is where he declares his mission manifesto. We might think of this passage as posing the question: how will Jesus live out his status as Beloved Son and embrace his missional calling? His way or God’s way?
V2 tells us he was hungry after being in the wilderness for forty days. He was hungry…. understatement of the century! 40 days is scripturally significant. It evokes 40 years of wandering. It also evokes Moses’ 40 days of fasting when he received the law from God (Exodus 34). 40 days was also the length of Elijah’s fasting as he walked to Mt. Horeb (1 Kings 19). Both Moses and Elijah will show up next week in the Transfiguration story.
The NAB uses the word tempted but tested is also valid. The Greek can be translated either way depending on the context. I think both words together give us a fuller picture of Jesus as being tested and tried and tempted by the devil or diabolos, a word meaning slanderer. It comes from the root word which means “to bring false charges.” Never trust what the devil says!
You may remember that Israel failed their test in the desert by grumbling about bread and water. We know Jesus is hungry. But the devil doesn’t appeal to his physical hunger. He’s much more insidious than that. Just prior to this Jesus has heard himself pronounced as the Beloved Son of God. I can imagine that the human part of him has been wrestling with that in the desert. What the devil wants is for Jesus to doubt that, to doubt it to the extent that he will try to prove it to someone in his own power.
So in v4, Jesus shifts away from that back to the idea of physical and spiritual hunger for God. He quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, the context of which is the giving of manna. Even when God fed the Israelites physical food, he was reminding them that spiritual hunger and spiritual nourishment is much more significant.
Vv5-7 is the next testing. Now… we know that Satan has not been handed the world to do with as he pleases, although some days it certainly feels that way. Jesus could easily have gotten caught up in a debate about who is more powerful. But what Jesus realizes here is that submitting to someone gives them power over you. And submitting to someone at this level turns that power into worship.
So Jesus reframes into a question of who he chooses to worship. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:13. In the context of entering the Promised Land, the Israelites were surrounded by cultures that worshiped a plethora of gods; they submitted to many different things. Jesus reminds us that we are to submit only to God and his power.
Temptation #3 is staged in Jerusalem. In Luke’s gospel, Jerusalem is the city of destiny. The gospel starts and ends there. This temptation is a prelude to the ultimate confrontation. The Devil in v9 takes Jesus to a parapet or pinnacle, a wing pointing out and hanging over from the top. There, the devil once more appeals to Jesus’ status as Son of God.
And in v10-11, the devil takes a page from Jesus’ playbook and quotes scripture, Psalm 91:11-12.
Jesus again responds from Deuteronomy 6:16. Massah was where the Israelites grumbled about not having any water. They doubted God’s ability to provide. Massah in Hebrew means testing. They weren’t satisfied with an Exodus from Egypt; they wanted more proof that God was with them.
In v13, the story concludes with the devil leaving Jesus for a time. This is the Greek word kairos, a time outside of chronology.
Like Jesus, you are a beloved child of God. Think back on some of the ways that the devil has tested that in you.
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© 2025 Kelly Sollinger