It was drummed into our heads as we eager, budding preachers sat week by week in our homiletics class. Context. Context. Context. And then, twenty years later, as a homiletics lecturer myself, teaching a new generation of would-be preachers, I repeated the mantra that had been passed on to me.
And of course, my predecessors were right. And so was I. It’s Preaching 101. If I want my congregation to grapple with Mark 10:32–45, I need to work out why Mark placed this section where he did. Assuming that he was a careful enough writer to have good reasons for ordering material the way he did, I will look at what has gone before, and what follows. I will see the section within the whole gospel, and listen to the echoes within the wider New Testament and the scriptures as a whole. And, if I do this, I know that I will be able to design a sermon that has depth and nuance and which resonates with the wider biblical message.
But despite all this careful work, there is a sobering thought that I need to be aware of. I can do all this thinking about the context of the text and miss the context of my listeners completely. At least sometimes.
