Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, “The King of the Jews”, but, “This man said, I am King of the Jews.” ’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written I have written.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, March 29, 2026
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: The cross, and what is says about us and God, is crucial to understanding why we have a reason to give thanks and praise.
While today is Palm/Passion Sunday, the Narrative Lectionary conforms the entirety of Lent into one long experience of the Passion. Compared to what one experiences in the Revised Common Lectionary, today’s readings are strikingly short (even if you add the optional reading). Whereas the struggle with the former is that the listener is drowned in an excess of scripture, here the opposite challenge presents itself. With so short a reading, it may prove hard to capture the sense in which this moment is a culmination for the narrative your listeners have been experiencing for the past several weeks. Those who missed a week or two might not have seen this coming, not in the sense that they were unaware Christ was crucified but because it can be hard for this moment to land with the necessary gravity. Your sermon will need to find a way to connect the event of the crucifixion to the significance it holds for our understanding of God and lives of faith.
One approach is to lean into the brevity and starkness of today’s passage from John. The cross is something we often try to avoid or work our way around. As Paul points out in 1 Corinthians, the cross is a scandal to some and foolishness to others, and until we have wrestled with how it repudiates our sense of strength and wisdom, we will not grasp its significance. And it is the question of the significance of Jesus’s crucifixion which is at issue, not only in the church today but in our reading as well. It is not enough for those who crucified Jesus to have accomplished the deed. They need to have control over how to narrate it. The religious leaders are troubled that the governor has described this as the crucifixion of their king and demand that the sign over Jesus make it clear he was crucified for claiming (in their estimate, falsely) to be their king. Pilate insists that the death of Jesus should serve to shore up imperial authority, broadcasting to all who see him that this is what happens to anyone who dares question the authority of Rome and its Caesar.
You and I know that the ultimate context of Jesus’s death is his resurrection, and that the empty tomb is what defines the significance of the crucifixion. But today is a good day to understand that it is easy for us who are “in the know” to take this significance for granted. The importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus needs to be constantly narrated and re-narrated for one another and our world. This is why Paul says that “faith comes through what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17).
Today is a day to make clear the significance of the cross and bid your listeners to look it straight in the face. Consider what other narratives or significances we use to try to negotiate around it or bend the cross to our own devices, so that you can point the hope of Easter Sunday as the day of ultimate significance, not only for the cross but for us as well. For it is in the death and resurrection of Christ that we come to know who we are by the grace of God and why we matter enough to God that God would take up the cross for us.
