Thursday August 22 Pentecost 13
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Psalm 131
God is like a mother on whom I rest in complete confidence.
Psalm 132
The psalm reminds God that David was committed to finding a permanent place for the ark to stay in Jerusalem and that God swore an oath that God would never abandon David or Jerusalem.
In our time we can understand this oath to be God’s absolute commitment to creation and to our rescue which is accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Psalm 133
Another short psalm expressing joy in the abundance we experience when humanity lives in unity—that is, in justice and inclusion of all.
Job 1.1-22 What’s Job about?
We now begin reading through the book of Job. Like the book of Ecclesiastes, this book is written to critique the common religious assumption in the Bible as well as in our own time, that if life goes well it is because God is rewarding you for being a good person, but if your life goes badly it is because you are being punished for being a bad person. This book has the courage to explore what it means if that assumption isn’t true. Because often it isn’t.
As the book opens, God is very impressed with Job’s faithfulness. However, at a sort of cosmic council of divine beings, the Satan challenges God, proposing that Job is only faithful because his life has been such a success. God gives the Satan permission to bring disaster upon Job’s success and upon those important to Job, but not to hurt Job himself. So, suddenly things go very badly for Job. He loses all his possessions to raiders and his family are all killed in a windstorm that destroys the house they were feasting in. Nevertheless, Job, being a good and faithful person does not blame God, and puts his trust in God who gave with generosity and now takes away.
Job’s friends explain that he must have done something terrible and that he should own up to his evil act, but Job insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. By refusing to pretend he did something bad to cause all this suffering, Job calls into question the whole idea of an automatic moral cause-and-effect process by which being good has positive results for us and being bad has negative results. Somehow our relationship with God is more than just receiving rewards and punishments for our behaviour. Something much deeper must be going on.
John 6.16-27 What’s John about?
As happened with the healing of the man on the Sabbath, opposition will arise as the kingdom arrives. A storm is brewing within the disciples and Jesus calms their storm and brings them instantly to their destination. Crowds have tracked Jesus down following his feeding of five thousand people. As often in John’s gospel, Jesus uses an event to start a conversation about its deeper meaning. For the next entire chapter Jesus explores the implications of being fed by him.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
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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