Saturday January 28 Epiphany 3
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Psalm 55
I am terrified at what is happening. The city is full of corruption and my dear familiar friend has betrayed me. I will not cease imploring God to intervene and put things right.
Appropriate for a Saturday, when Jesus, betrayed by friends, waits in silence in the grave.
Isaiah 51: 1-8 What’s Isaiah about?
God speaks to those who have been captured and who are still committed to God’s justice and inclusion of all: don’t forget that your roots are in God like granite from a quarry and that the way things are now can be blown away like smoke and that the Babylonians who have conquered you will be like cloth eaten by moths.
Mark 7: 1-23 What’s Mark about?
Jesus is in conflict with religious leaders. They believe that loyalty to God means demonstrating that loyalty through religious rituals such as ritual washing before eating. This was not washing for sanitary reasons as we think of it, but was a holiness ceremony. As long as you made yourself holy through careful rituals, that was all that God required. Judging whether you did the ritual correctly gave religious leaders great power. These leaders accuse Jesus of leading his disciples into not caring about these rituals and so not being holy. Their own motivations are unholy—to get power over people.
Jesus realizes their unholiness doesn’t come from rituals but from their inner motivations. Jesus insists that wanting to do justice is the sign of holiness and loyalty to God and that desire only come from within us, not from external rituals.
Are we tempted to assume that being religious makes us holy? No, Jesus, says, religion and scripture are as useless as excrement unless they express what is already inside us—the commitment to God’s justice and dignity for all. Being religious in order to get something for oneself is blasphemy. No wonder, Mark is saying, that the religious authorities reject Jesus.
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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