Thursday January 14 Epiphany 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. It can be read as if it were the experience of one person being rescued or as if the nation is speaking with a single voice.
Isaiah 41: 17-29
God is so powerful that God can make the immense Syrian desert, which separates the people from their home in Jerusalem, be filled with water and food and trees. Isaiah has a clever argument to counter those who point out that such a rescue was never prophesied in the Bible and so can’t be due to God: if you doubt that God is making Cyrus let you go, the absence of prophesy about this only proves that the God of justice can change the future—that’s why nobody ever predicted this! Everyone who thought they knew what would happen turn out to be wrong because God can act beyond the prophesies of scripture and can change the future!
What would such confidence look like in our time?
Mark 2: 1-12
Four friends are so desperate that their paralysed friend be healed that they jump the queue by getting on the roof and lowering the sick man on ropes to get him in front of Jesus. As they understood it, some terrible sin the man had done must have caused his paralysis, but his friends are determined he will be healed from that and so his body will also be healed. So Jesus enacts the kingdom in a new way – the man is welcomed into the community of the holy even though he says not a word—hadn’t repented or even asked for anything. The religious leaders are appalled—religion will be worth nothing if everyone can enter heaven that easily, but Jesus insists the kingdom is breaking in and that rule-breaking generosity is typical of God.
This week’s collect:
Eternal Father,
who at the baptism of Jesus
revealed him to be your Son,
anointing him with the Holy Spirit,
keep your children, born of water and the Spirit,
faithful to their calling;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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