Monday September 2 Pentecost 15
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Psalm 9
O God, you have always taken the side of the oppressed and abused to defend them against the powerful. May the oppressors be caught in their own schemes. Don’t forget us now, and don’t let the oppressors succeed and think they have the power.
Psalm 15
We are strong when we act in justice.
Job 12.1-6, 13-25 What’s Job about?
Job responds that his friends’ wisdom has changed nothing about God making him a laughing-stock. God’s power is immense, he says, and God can arbitrarily act with regard to nations and kings, as God has with him. There needs to be no rhyme or reason. That’s just the way God is, without compassion or justice.
John 8.21-30 What’s John about?
Jesus repeats that the opposition cannot come where he will go. They ask if he means suicide? Perhaps John, the writer, is responding to a critique which might have arisen at his time of writing—maybe a suggestion that Jesus wasn’t being loyal to God by dying, but instead was deliberately engineering his own death to make a point, a type of suicide. Jesus insists that he is speaking what God asks him to, and that it is their fault if they don’t see that. They may come to understand his death after they have “lifted him up” in crucifixion.
This week’s collect:
Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
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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