Saturday April 2 Lent 4
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Psalm 107 Part 2
When the Israelites completed their journey through the wilderness God brought disaster on the evil people who lived there (as the Israelites understood them) to make a fertile place for God’s own people. When God’s people were oppressed, God rescued them. Wise people, the poem says, will take this to heart and will trust in God’s care and justice to prevail.
Jesus contradicts this horrific attitude to the first peoples when he deliberately feeds four thousand of them, recognizing their equality.
One of our tasks today is to cultivate that trust in God’s care for humanity so that when disaster happens in our world we will have something solid to offer.
Psalm 108
I will praise God because God is so powerful and I ask you, God, to act on behalf of the poor. God replies by listing all ways in which land will be given to God’s people and taken from those who are evil. I respond by asking God to act to save us because it seems God has abandoned us.
These two psalms are scheduled for Saturdays as we experience the wait for the resurrection while Christ is still in the grave.
Exodus 2.23-3.15 What’s Exodus about?
The people groan under their Egyptian slavery, and God remembers that God had entered into a covenant with Abraham that they would be a great people, and starts to arrange for their freedom. God calls Moses from a burning bush to confront Pharaoh, and to lead the people into the wilderness and to encounter God at this same place, Mount Sinai, where God will give the Ten Commandments. Moses is reluctant, so God tells him God’s name —which is to show him God’s deepest reality.
God’s name—God’s reality—is “I am,” or “I am who I am,” or “I was, I am, I will be.” This word is so holy that Jews are forbidden to pronounce it, so it is written in Hebrew and in the Bible only with its consonants: YHWH so someone reading out loud couldn’t say the name even by accident. That name is now represented in English translations as “THE LORD.” Earlier English translations encouraged Christians to pronounce the name but misspelled it as “Jehovah.”
This character of deep reality, the “I AM,” will be sufficient to overcome all Egyptian opposition. We might understand that God’s deepest reality—past, present and future—is to be just and thus always on the side of dignity and fulfillment for all. If that is true, then the struggle for a just world cannot be opposed forever. Christians see that just world breaking through in the resurrection of Jesus.
Mark 9.14-29 What’s Mark about?
Even after experiencing a foretaste of Jesus’ resurrection (in the transfiguration) the disciples are unable to trust Jesus’ insisting that he (and they) must become vulnerable for the kingdom to break in.
Now they encounter a distraught father of an epileptic boy who knows he does not trust very much (a better translation than “believe”) and he asks Jesus to help him trust more. In contrast, the disciples do not ask Jesus to help them trust—they want to know how to get the power to throw out the demon. Jesus’ responds that only prayer can do this—he may mean that they don’t trust yet in the power of God to carry them through death into resurrection, and thereby carry the boy through evil into health. Prayer is the way we come to know this startling aspect of God—that only through vulnerability is it possible to love. Even for God.
Up to this point in Mark’s gospel the disciples think that bringing healing to the world can be done by the exercise of sheer power. From this chapter on, Jesus is clear that only giving up self-centred power will allow God’s loving power to break in. Mark is saying that we must first learn to want to trust in God’s surrounding love, then we will be able to give up using power for self-centred purposes, and then God’s loving kingdom can break into our lives and into the world.
Trusting in sheer power has always been an an attractive option in our personal lives and relationships. We are seeing more clearly in our time how seductive and destructive that option is as the most powerful levels of public and international leadership opt for the power of destruction over the power of vulnerable love. No wonder our world is in such crisis.
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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