Logout
Lectionary for March 15, 2026
Fourth Sunday in Lent
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23;
Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
Did you ever start out to do something great, but your first attempt didn’t work that well? Maybe your congregation tried to bring in more young folks, and the outreach effort failed. Or maybe you tried to finally address that festering issue in a relationship, and your first attempt actually made things worse. Good news—folks in the Bible can relate! This week, several stories in the lectionary show people trying one thing and then, when it didn’t work quite as expected, trying something else.
The first story from 1 Samuel is about God’s mission to find a new king. Saul, the previous king of Israel, had been pointedly disobeying direct commands from God (15:19). What’s worse, instead of repenting of his perfidy immediately, he set out on a tour around Israel to set up monuments to himself (12). Saul is much more interested in enriching himself and making his own name great with monuments than in doing what God instructed. Time to pick a plan B!
Seeing this, God instructed Samuel to anoint a new king. God sent Samuel to Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse. All of them are terrified of the prophet, it must be said, so their first question was, “Do you come in peace?” When Samuel made his mission clear—to anoint a new king—Jesse’s impressive older sons were paraded in front of him. Eliab, Abinadab, Shammah all passed before Samuel (17:13), but God insisted none of these professional fighters were to be king. Time for a plan C!
At last, the young boy with a reddish complexion and a little too much beauty was called. This boy did not look like a king! In fact, the descriptions of David’s beauty (16:12, 16:18, 17:42) intentionally echo that of Rachel (Genesis 29:17), Rebekah (24:16), Sarah (12:11) and Joseph, the other littlest brother who had trouble blending in with rugged shepherds (39:6). In other words, David’s appearance is not especially kingly in Samuel’s eyes. But God looks at the heart!
Let us humbly follow the patterns of Samuel, the psalmist and even Jesus in being open to plan B.
In probably the favorite psalm of most readers, two very different images are at play. In the first part of the psalm (2:1-4), the speaker is a metaphorical sheep who is fed and protected by God-as-shepherd (see Jeremiah 23:1-4; Isaiah 40:10-11). In the second part, God is no longer the shepherd but the dinner-party host, offering cups of wine and anointing heads (if I see another blog about “anointing” sheep heads with oil, I will vomit! That’s not what’s going on!).
The shift between the two images happens when the psalmist changes language, not God. In the shepherd imagery, the psalmist describes to someone else what the Lord is like: The Lord is my shepherd, he causes me to lie down, he leads me, he restores, he guides .… But when the psalmist switches to address God directly, the metaphors change. The sheep imagery is for an audience. When the psalmist addresses God, God is a protector (rod and staff and a table set in the presence of enemies). The psalmist is not a sheep in his own eyes. That shepherd metaphor is plan A. Plan B was God as host and the psalmist as guest. This is closer to the composer’s heart and slips out when directly addressing God.
In the Gospel reading for this week, Jesus deploys a two-step pattern of speaking with the man who was born blind. Without asking him for a profession of faith or even what he wanted, Jesus made mud from his own spit, wiped it on the man’s eyes, and sent him away to wash it off. Plan A seems to have been for the man to offer incontrovertible proof that Jesus had performed the greatest miracle—healing blindness (this was a bigger deal than even raising the dead, which some other miracle workers, like Elijah and Elisha, had performed). Upon cleaning his eyes, the man could see! And he quickly came to see that a miracle that doesn’t fit preconceived theologies and beliefs is incredibly threatening to those who are more interested in their systematic beliefs than in what God is doing.
But Jesus wasn’t done with the man. The man born blind knew that he had been healed by God’s power and that it was a man called Jesus who had done it, but he didn’t know much else. After the man was excommunicated, Jesus went and found him again. Time for plan B! Jesus asked the man if he believed in the Human One. The man was willing, if Jesus could point him out. When Jesus identified himself as the Son of Humanity, and in the process also identified himself as the one who had given him his sight, the man worshiped Jesus.
Look, plan A doesn’t always work in business, romance, academics or governance. Sometimes we must resort to plan B (or C, D, E …). Let us humbly follow the patterns of Samuel, the psalmist and even Jesus in being open to plan B.
