Monday March 28 Lent 4
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Psalm 89 Part 1
God’s faithfulness in creation is the basis for our trust in God’s justice and care for us. Just as God created order from chaos in creation, so we can rely upon God to create order out of chaos in human society. God’s original goodness intended for humanity and the world, is that everyone have a place and dignity and worth. Accomplishing that is the work of justice, often translated into traditional English as “righteousness.”
Genesis 49.1-28 What’s Genesis about?
As Jacob is dying, he blesses each of the twelve brothers.
This song, placed on Jacob’s lips, would have first been sung many centuries later and intends to explain the historical situations of the various tribes at that much later time. Some of the tribes had disappeared, and the song attributes this to Jacob having condemned them for various violations.
The writer of the song wants to uphold God’s reliability in the promise to Jacob of becoming the ancestor of a great nation. Where that didn’t happen, it must be the fault of those tribes’ ancestors who violated their father Jacob. Note that this is the same explanation given at the time of the defeat by Babylon and the tribes being enslaved there when these stories were compiled—it was not God forgetting the promise but the leaders forsaking God’s call to justice that caused the disaster.
Mark 7.24-37 What’s Mark about?
Jesus travels to the region where the aboriginal people live, the people who, following God’s orders, Joshua had been told to exterminate when the Israelites first entered the promised land. An aboriginal woman argues with Jesus (an unimaginable insult), and then wins the argument! And her child is healed. Jesus has named her people as dogs, which is what Jews of the time considered them to be, and then by healing her daughter, enacts his understanding of God’s inclusion of all cultures. Jesus then heals an aboriginal man. He is undoing the abuse carried out by his ancestors and critiquing the Hebrew Bible’s commands that the original people be exterminated. The application to our day is obvious.
In verse 34, the translation says “sighed” but more accurately it means something like “groaned” or “grunted with anger”—it means that Jesus is incensed that people are still suffering like this deaf man, regardless of their religion or culture. That’s how profound his commitment is to the inclusion of all. Notice that these foreigners fully support Jesus. Opposition to Jesus comes from those close to him, not from those who had been far away.
This week’s collect:
Gracious Father,
whose blessed Son came from heaven
to be the true bread which gives life to the world,
evermore give us this bread,
that he may live in us, and we in him,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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