Friday March 24 Lent 4
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Psalm 102
A lament at the destruction of Jerusalem 600 years before Jesus. It ends with hope of God’s faithfulness. The imagery of desolation is appropriate for Fridays, the mini-anniversary of Jesus being betrayed, abandoned, and in hours will be dead. Yet God will remain faithful.
Jeremiah 23: 1-8 What’s Jeremiah about?
God accuses the leaders who have encouraged injustice and declares that they will be replaced with leaders who will encourage justice. Verses 5-7 say that God will rescue the people and even that where they once said the greatest thing that ever happened was the crossing of the Red Sea, now people will say the greatest thing that ever happened was God rescuing them from Babylon. This was a revolutionary claim that God was moving beyond the ancient events in the Bible and was doing something much more amazing right now.
We might ask if we have any expectation that God might do amazing things in our times, beyond anything in our faith. It’s a startling suggestion that God is very much active now. If we think it is, our challenge is to discover in what way that is happening.
John 6: 52-59 What’s John about?
John, the gospel writer, is continuing this conversational, almost Socratic, method of presenting what Jesus’ importance is.
Jesus says that he is the real food of life, and that his flesh must be eaten and his blood drunk. That image was even more startling for ancient Jews than for us. The most fundamental kosher rule, still obeyed by Jews, is that there must be no blood in food, because all blood, being the source of life, is holy. For Jesus to say he must be eaten and drunk would be sacrilegious and revolting. The idea deliberately suggests cannibalism.
John is using that startling image to ensure we pay attention to this central understanding that Jesus’ life can become everyone’s life. John began his gospel with the story of Jesus pouring out astonishing volumes of wine at a wedding reception—now John is moving to the next level: Jesus is astonishingly going to pour out his entire life for us, and by implication, the life of God. Because, as Jesus has said repeatedly, he and the Father are one.
It’s possible that by the time this gospel was written, sixty or seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, communion had become the main way of experiencing Jesus’ being present. We know that some early opposition to Christianity, misunderstanding communion whether on purpose or not, had claimed that Christians were practising human sacrifice and cannibalism when they met for communion. So John may have been taking those criticisms and re-interpreting them as deeper insights into Jesus’ significance.
John is suggesting that Jesus’ life of death and resurrection can become the central dynamic of our lives when we also give our life to others in caring love. Communion had become the central experience of that happening in us.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
through the waters of baptism
your Son has made us children of light.
May we ever walk in his light
and show forth your glory in the world;
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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