Friday September 3 Pentecost 14
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Psalm 31
I am being attacked from all sides but trust that God will rescue me. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus quotes from this psalm as he is dying. Appropriate for Friday as the weekly mini-anniversary of the crucifixion.
1 Kings 11: 26-43 What’s Kings about?
Solomon promotes Jeroboam, a capable servant, to responsibility for forced labour in Jerusalem. A prophet believes that God is abandoning Solomon because of his infidelity to the God of justice, and encourages Jeroboam to think that God will displace Solomon and make him, Jeroboam, king. The prophet predicts that God will take the northern tribes away from Solomon, but will retain one tribe in Jerusalem to remain loyal to Solomon. When his plans are discovered by Solomon, Jeroboam flees to Egypt.
The compilers of these stories, writing after the return from slavery in Babylon five hundred years later, are putting into the prophet’s mouth their belief that the Babylon disaster and the permanent destruction of the northern tribes is God’s punishment, delayed by a generation, upon Solomon’s infidelity. The punishment is that ten tribes will be absorbed into the Assyrian kingdom but God will have mercy and ensure that one tribe will be left to provide descendants for Solomon and David as God had promised.
Solomon dies in old age, and we anticipate how the injustice caused by the kings will continue to grow with the subsequent kings. Solomon’s son, Rehoboam (“the nation grows”) who rules the south of the country (called “Judah”) from Jerusalem will treat the people selfishly when Jeroboam (“the nation struggles”) makes himself an alternate king in the northern part of the country (called “Israel”) and governs from Samaria. We see the country beginning to fall apart.
Mark 15: 22-32 What’s Mark about?
Jesus is crucified and abused during the crucifixion. He is abandoned by everyone. There are no limits to which God won’t go in loyalty to humanity.
This week’s collect:
Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
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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