Readings for Thursday December 2

Thursday December 2          Advent 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.

Amos 4: 6-13                            What’s Amos about?
God complains that over and over God has sent warnings to the people and they have ignored all of them. But the time of warnings is coming to an end and soon the people will face the full consequences of their infidelity to the God of justice.

The verse about “clean teeth” doesn’t refer to good dental hygiene, but to lack of food—one of God’s warnings.

Matthew 21: 33-46                            What’s Matthew about?
Jesus tells a story of a revolt by vineyard workers who murder the owner’s son so they can take the profits. Jesus then changes the image and speaks of the enormous temple stones crushing people. Around the time Matthew wrote his gospel this actually happened. When demolishing the temple the Romans deliberately dropped the enormous blocks of stone on people, crushing them. Matthew’s readers would have understood that the approaching execution of Jesus was the revolt, and that the Roman destruction of the temple was the consequence.

Matthew lived in a time when opposition to the faith was growing stronger, and he understands Jesus to be saying that we can trust God’s presence to lie beneath the threatening events of our time.

We read these challenging stories in Advent to remain alert to what has to change when God’s kingdom comes—first in the birth of Jesus, and now in our time.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and put on the armour of light,
now in the time of this mortal life
in which your Son Jesus Christ
came to us in great humility,
that on the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge both the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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