Monday April 4 Lent 5
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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.
Exodus 4.10-31 What’s Exodus about?
It appears that Moses’ fear and self-doubt may sabotage God’s commitment to make the Israelites into a great people. God’s response of anger is better understood to be God’s disappointment, or frustration, that even Moses doesn’t trust that when God makes a covenant, God will keep that covenant absolutely. God finds a way around this obstruction, as God will find a way around Pharaoh’s opposition, and God appoints Aaron as the articulate speaker. When Moses and Aaron return from Mount Sinai, the people trust that God has remembered them and that they will return to their land, and they worship the true God.
A strange and very primitive story appears in the middle of this account of Moses preparing to lead the people. It seems to have no relation to the larger story and may have been placed here by accident by an early arranger of the text who decided that a story about God attacking Moses would fit best here close to the story of God’s frustration at Moses’ reluctance to lead. It’s not clear what the original story about the foreskin meant – it might have been an alternate explanation for the origin of circumcision – as a symbolic marriage between God and humanity. “Feet” was often a euphemism for a person’s private parts, so perhaps Zipporah was understood to be symbolically circumcising Moses to turn God’s anger away.
Mark 9.30-41 What’s Mark about?
Jesus teaches a second time about the need to die in order to love totally. The disciples do the opposite—they quarrel about which of them is most important. Jesus uses a child, the most unimportant person in their society, to demonstrate that dying to wanting to be the most important person is essential to enacting God’s love. The disciples continue their selfishness by being arrogant to an outsider who follows Jesus, but Jesus insists that whoever follows him is enacting God’s love – both the powerless and the rejected. The disciples still do not understand the love to which Jesus is leading them.
The disciples provide a good mirror for us to look into: we are also tempted to use faith as a way of becoming powerful and important, or to imagine that God loves us more than people of other faiths. That way is as challenging for us as it was for the disciples.
This week’s collect:
Most merciful God,
by the death and resurrection
of your Son Jesus Christ,
you created humanity anew.
May the power of his victorious cross
transform those who turn in faith
to him who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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