Tuesday December 29 Christmas 1
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Psalm 18 Part 1
A meditation on God’s immense power to save: – a poetic imaginative recounting of the crossing of the Red Sea as if it were the experience of one person being rescued.
Isaiah 60.1-5
The poet is speaking to Jerusalem as if it were a person: when God brings back the people from their distant exile, light will shine, children will be well, abundance will break out, and all the other nations will bring their wealth.
Details in this passage probably influenced the story of the three wise ones visiting Jesus at his birth.
John 7: 37-52
The opposition to Jesus deepens as the Passover approaches. Jesus has claimed to fulfil our greatest thirst. But the religious leaders insist that Jesus cannot be the messiah because he is from Nazareth, whereas scripture says the messiah will come from King David’s town of Bethlehem. Luke’s and Matthew’s very different stories of how someone from Nazareth in the far north came to be born in Bethlehem in the south may be intended to resolve this anomaly of Jesus not having lived anywhere near Bethlehem.
The question posed to us is whether our discipleship of Jesus arises from his fulfilling the expectations of our society, or whether it is the new life we receive, through being included in his death and resurrection, that draws us to him. If we are drawn to him, as was Nicodemus, we may find society critical of us because of the deep challenges that Christ poses to the usual assumptions of what is ‘normal.’
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have shed upon us the new light
of your incarnate Word.
May this light, enkindled in our hearts,
shine forth in our lives;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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