Saturday March 18 Lent 3
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Psalm 87
A vision of Jerusalem as the source of life for all the world, as if every nation and every beautiful thing originated there. Christians might interpret this as Jesus’ death and resurrection in Jerusalem being the source of life and beauty for the whole world.
Psalm 90
Our lives are very short, like a breath we are gone, we are so insignificant. Bless us, God.
Jeremiah 13: 1-11 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah uses an astonishing image: God made the people to be as intimate with God as a person’s underwear is with their body. But the people have abandoned God. So God tells Jeremiah to enact the horror of what the people have done: buy new underwear, wear it but don’t wash it, then leave it under a rock in Babylon until it is rotten. That, Jeremiah says, is what the people have done to themselves. They have made themselves rotten and smelly by abandoning justice. Jeremiah repeatedly uses this technique of enacted images to confront the people.
Our world has deeply abandoned God in so many ways. Following Jeremiah we could say that our world stinks, and we need to face that fact, uncomfortable as it is. Lent is the time for the challenging but necessary task of facing uncomfortable facts about our world’s priorities.
John 8: 47-59 What’s John about?
Many Jews suggested the early Christians could rejoin Judaism if Jesus could be understood to be a prophet. However, John, speaking for the early Christians, understands that Jesus is not a prophet like Moses (or, much later, like Mohamed) whose role is to communicate God’s wishes. In contrast, Jesus insists he is the way we see God, and not a prophet or a good person. At the end of this passage John understands Jesus to use the ancient Hebrew name for God: “I am.” This seals his fate, and that of Christianity, in that Jesus is claiming ultimate significance: his death and resurrection are the ultimate experience of God, not the action of a good person.
What’s at stake is whether our experience of Jesus leads us to be astonished at God’s commitment to us in dying and rising for us, or whether we see Jesus as an extremely good person whom we ought to emulate, but cannot. John is commending the former as the real experience of Christianity.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ gives the water of eternal life,
may we always thirst for you,
the spring of life and source of goodness;
through him who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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