Wednesday July 6 Pentecost 4
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Psalm 119 Part 1
Psalm 119 is a meditation on responding to God’s call to justice. Each of the 176 verses is a variation on the theme of what it means to follow God’s call to justice, using terms such as “command”,”law”, “word”, “statute”, and the like. The psalm is arranged in twenty-two groups of eight verses. Within a group, each of the eight verses starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the groups are in Hebrew alphabetical order. So the first group of eight verses all start with A, the second group all start with B and so on. The first seven verses mirror the seven days of creation, with the eighth sometimes pointing to the next group.
This very careful construction mirrors God’s creating the universe by overcoming chaos with order. In the human world, justice, dignity and fulfilment – the outcomes of justice—are the expressions of this order. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. Today’s three sections begin with the letters A, B and G (in Hebrew alphabetical order). As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with A” and so on.
Deuteronomy 1.1-18 What’s Deuteronomy about?
Today we begin a brief reading through the book of Deuteronomy. This book consists of three speeches by Moses just before the people enter the promised land. Moses then dies. In the first speech, Moses recalls their 40 years in the wilderness and encourages the people to follow the laws in Leviticus and Numbers; in the second speech Moses encourages the people to remain faithful to the one true God; and in the third speech Moses reminds them that even if they fail to be faithful, God will not abandon them.
In today’s reading Moses begins the first speech by assigning leaders to succeed him and reminding judges that they are to ensure they make decisions with justice and are not motivated by selfishness. We may be overhearing the concerns of those who compiled these stories more than a thousand years later when the Israelites were in exile in distant Babylon and were anticipating the challenges of remaining faithful to the God of justice that would arise as they returned to the land.
Matthew 23.27-39 What’s Matthew about?
Matthew continues his prophetic description of the end of the world. The background to this relentless criticism of religious leaders is that Matthew wrote after Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans, and he understood that Jesus would have foreseen this destruction as punishment for the leaders’ faithlessness in abandoning God’s justice and care for the poor while boasting in their own importance. Today’s passage is how Matthew imagines Jesus warning of the disaster. We are to watch for the same hypocrisy in ourselves.
The phrase “Your house is left to you desolate” refers to the temple—the house of God—destroyed by the Romans in Matthew’s life-time. Matthew points out that the religious leaders are descended from those who murdered the prophet Zechariah in the temple, and that their betrayal of God will culminate in their execution of Jesus.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son Jesus Christ has taught us
that what we do for the least of your children
we do also for him.
Give us the will to serve others
as he was the servant of all,
who gave up his life and died for us,
but lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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