Monday January 23 Epiphany 3
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Psalm 41
Just as we care for the poor and needy, so God cares for us. I am needy in that I have sinned and my enemies and even my friends are all conspiring against me and hoping that I will die. All I can do is trust that God will protect me.
When we, or our world, seem to have little hope, we ground ourselves in knowing God holds us fast.
Psalm 52
Cruel powerful people seem to run the world, but we trust that God will enable the world to be as fertile as a green olive tree and evil will be ended.
Isaiah 48: 1-11 What’s Isaiah about?
God insists that the act of bringing Cyrus to defeat the Assyrians and so allow the Israelites to return to Jerusalem, is God’s own free act. Some Israelites may have been opposing Isaiah by saying that nothing like this was ever predicted in the scriptures, but Isaiah turns that argument on its head: if Cyrus letting them go was never predicted in scripture, that proves that God does completely new things that nobody could have anticipated! That was as revolutionary a claim then as it is now: God can ignore what’s in the Bible—keeping the covenant and implementing justice for all now is more important than ancient acts recorded or prophesied in scripture.
Mark 5: 21-43 What’s Mark about?
Jesus has calmed a storm on a lake, then inside a person, and now calms storms inside two women. The first woman was an outcast because of her constant menstrual bleeding and could never have children and was socially ostracized, being considered highly infectious. She would be considered a failure and hardly even an adult because in that culture having a child is what made a woman a full adult. Jesus then heals a little girl, whose illness at age 12 almost prevented her from ever becoming an adult. This little girl had been born at the same time as the adult woman first became ill. Obviously there are several layers of meaning in these two stories which are intertwined around each other.
Jesus is healing all the things that keep us from being our full selves and coming into maturity, and particularly those who are oppressed—such as women in the ancient world. These healings are more than just of individual bodies—Jesus is healing the body of society from being prejudiced, stunted and unfulfilled. The kingdom of God really is arriving.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
by grace alone you call us
and accept us in your service.
Strengthen us by your Spirit,
and make us worthy of your call;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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