What made a motet appropriate for performance on a particular occasion in the sixteenth century? Previous studies have demonstrated that motets performed on a given day generally drew their texts from the liturgy of that day. Yet many of the eighty-five motets assigned to the Sundays and major feasts of the year in Johannes Rühling's Tabulaturbuch (1583) do not. What mattered to this Lutheran organist was not a motet text's previous liturgical association but its ability to gloss—sometimes in surprising ways—the Gospel or Epistle lesson of the day. His approach has strong parallels in a tradition of Lutheran preaching grounded in exegesis of the assigned lessons. The same exegetical approach figures, moreover, in Catholic use of the motet, exemplified both in musical sources, such as Andreas Pevernage's Cantiones sacrae (1578 and 1602), and in performances recorded in the diaries of the Sistine Chapel.