Monday January 30 Epiphany 4
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Psalm 56
In the face of intense attack by evil, we trust that God will act for what is right.
Psalm 57
Another psalm expressing our trust that God will act for what is right in the face of intense attack by evil.
Isaiah 51: 17-23 What’s Isaiah about?
In the first half of this poem, using images of drunkenness and devastation, God describes the desolation of Jerusalem in which the city has been left abandoned after the people were taken in slavery to Babylon. Although this disaster came from God’s wrath, the cause is never that God is angry, but as the inevitable consequences of the nation having abandoned the priority of justice for all, which is the character of God. Instead the people have become drunk on the desire for wealth and oppression of the poor. No wonder Jerusalem is devastated.
But in the second half of this poem, God reverses the image and says God will stand on the side of the devastated people and against those who treated the people like a street to walk on. Instead, the oppressors will be made to be drunk with disaster. That’s how just and strong God is. The people are to count on God acting with justice to restore Jerusalem. The poem challenges us to ask if we are able to trust in God’s power of justice in our day.
Mark 7: 24-37 What’s Mark about?
Having just declared that purity arises from one’s intentions and not from being religious, Jesus travels to the province in which the aboriginal people lived, the people whom Joshua had been commanded to exterminate when the Israelites first entered the promised land. For faithful Jews of Jesus’ time, these people were dirty, immoral and contaminated. One of the aboriginal women argues with Jesus, an unimaginable insult to a man in those time, trying to force him to heal her daughter. And, even worse, she wins the argument! In response, Jesus heals her child.
The implication is obvious: the external facts of being aboriginal are of no importance, it’s the inner motivations which matter, and this “contaminated” woman is deeply pure because she risks a man’s wrath to ensure her child is healed.
Jesus then heals an aboriginal man. In verse 34, the translation says Jesus “sighed” when looking up to God, but more accurately it means something like he “growled” or “roared with anger”—it means that Jesus was incensed that people—especially these aboriginal people who had been abused and crushed—were still suffering like this deaf man. Jesus is reversing the abuse carried out by his ancestors and commanded by scripture. This was a highly provocative and risky act which undermined the most fundamental beliefs of his own Jewish people.
Next, Jesus will feed a staggering number of aboriginal people and will come under severe criticism by the religious leaders.
This week’s collect:
Living God,
in Christ you make all things new.
Transform the poverty of our nature
by the riches of your grace,
and in the renewal of our lives
make known your glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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