Tuesday November 29 Advent 1
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Psalm 5
There is evil all around, but I will go into your presence, O God, and know that you are more powerful than all evil and will protect us.
Psalm 6
I have been hounded almost to death, help me, God. Thanks be to God that God heard me and the evil people will be overcome.
Isaiah 1: 21-31 What’s Isaiah about?
As far as we know the ancient Israelites were the only culture to believe that God made a priority of including people with little power. ‘Justice’ and ‘righteousness’ are the English translations of words referring to that priority of inclusion, justice and valuing of all persons by God. The implication was that the Israelite nation must also make inclusion of the poor a priority.
This understanding of God may have arisen from Israel’s experience of being rescued from slavery in Egypt by God even though they were a small and powerless people. Isaiah’s expectation is that now they are enslaved again, this time by Babylon a thousand years later, their God will rescue them again. But this time they will be also rescued from their own exploitation of one another. Isaiah uses extensive imagery to make that hope real for the people of his time.
The early Christians interpreted Isaiah’s expectation as if he had been looking forward to God’s final completion of a new world through Jesus’ death and resurrection.
In today’s reading Isaiah understands that the disaster of Babylonian slavery has fallen upon the people because they abandoned making the powerless their country’s priority.
Luke 20.9-18 What’s Luke about?
Towards the end of Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ confrontation with the religious authorities intensifies. In this story Jesus confronts those who run the vineyard—that is, the religious leaders who are exploiting the poor in Jerusalem.
Luke understands that Jesus has special knowledge of the fact that Rome will destroy Jerusalem 40 years later. At the time Luke was writing, the early Christians interpreted the disaster of Rome permanently destroying the temple as God’s punishment for generations of religious exploitation.
For religious leaders in the temple to exploit and crush the poor was the ultimate offence against the God of justice and inclusion for all and disaster for the temple would certainly follow.
These passages are chosen for this first week in Advent to challenge us to make the necessary changes in society as God’s rule approaches.
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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