Saturday August 24 Pentecost 13
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Psalm 137
Another psalm expressing terrible grief that the nation had been abandoned. When the people were captured and taken to Babylon about 700 years before Jesus, they were asked to amuse their captors with funny songs, and were horrified to have to entertain those who had destroyed their land and the glorious temple dedicated to justice.
The concluding couple of verses of this psalm are disturbingly violent. We sometimes also feel violent when we are abused, so there is an honest recognition of that truth here. Or we can think of this part as a commitment to ensuring that all evil should be completely removed from the world.
Psalm 144
This psalm expresses the feeling that we are not very strong in face of terrible forces, but that God can act to save us, and the end result will be unimaginable prosperity and happiness.
These two psalms are chosen for a Saturday when Jesus lies dead in the grave, destroyed by evil as was Jerusalem. Yet Jesus and Jerusalem were to hear a call to new and glorious life.
Job 3.1-26 What’s Job about?
The Satan had told God that if he were allowed to hurt Job physically Job would curse God. And now it happens. Job curses the day he was born and the night he was conceived—since God knitted together his bones in the womb this is equivalent to cursing God. At least in the grave he would have company. This passage is perhaps the most searing expression of despair and defiance in the Bible.
The rest of the book explores how Job’s friends offer a variety of explanations by which God’s bringing disaster would make sense. But Job insists that their explanations don’t make sense because he hasn’t done anything wrong.
By refusing to accept the explanation that an act on his part caused his disaster, Job calls into question the whole religious concept of a cosmic moral cause-and-effect process by which being good always has positive results for us. The author is asking us not to settle for imagining our relationship with God is about receiving rewards and punishments for our behaviour—instead there must be something deeper.
Job’s strong objection to God is the foundation of the Jewish spiritual tradition of arguing with God and demanding God explain God’s actions.
John 6.41-51 What’s John about?
Jesus insists more emphatically that he is from God and that people who disagree haven’t known God. He then presses more deeply into the image that he is food and that his flesh is bread for the world. This forceful and disturbing image will provoke forceful objections.
We may be overhearing controversies about Jesus that were going on in John’s time between the Jewish Christians who had seen in Jesus an entirely new way of understanding God, and those who saw that interpretation of Jesus as a sacrilegious attack on their faith.
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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