Lent Lectionary Notes

Welcome to one of CCOW’s resources for Lent: our Linked Lectionary Notes, which are based on the principal Sunday readings from the Revised Common Lectionary for Year B. These were created in 2018, but are still pertinent in 2024.

For each Sunday in Lent we explore some of the ideas and themes in the set readings (column 3) and then reflect on them, linking them to a contemporary global issue (column 4). The idea is to help people connect the Bible with today’s world – looking at each through the lens of the other.

The resource is aimed at anyone who will be interacting with the passages each week – primarily preachers, but also those leading the intercessions, or even putting together the pew sheet. It’s also offered as a resource for personal reflection and could be used in a small group setting. The notes are not a finished sermon – rather they raise questions and offer thoughts.

These notes are a revival of a resource called Development Matters, which Elizabeth put together for Bath and Wells Diocese for over a decade. (Some of these notes have also featured in the Fairtrade Foundation’s Church Action Guides for Fairtrade Fortnight). Two quotes particularly inspired this endeavour:

‘I simply argue that the cross be raised at the centre of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on a town garbage dump…at a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. That is where he died, and that is what he died about, and that is where Christ’s people ought to be, and what church people ought to be about.’
George Macleod, founder of the Iona Community.

‘In a Jesus society, you repent, not by feeling bad, but by thinking different’.
Mennonite author Rudy Wiebe in The Blue Mountains of China.