Friday September 6 Pentecost 15
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Psalm 35
A demand that God should protect me from evil people who want me to fail. We can read this psalm as applying to our own self, or as a way of experiencing the life of a person or group who are being abused and exploited. In the end we will praise God because God will protect us.
Appropriate for a Friday, the weekly mini-anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion, in which no amount of suffering or abuse could compare with the joy of loving us.
Job 19.1-27 What’s Job about?
Job insists that it is God’s fault that he is so beaten down and humiliated. “God has put me in the wrong.” Job continues to refuse the easy explanation that he is being punished for something he did when he know he’s done nothing to deserve this abuse. It is God who has done this, not Job.
John 9: 18-41 What’s John about?
The challenge continues about what our new sight reveals. The religious leaders, opposed to seeing the world differently through new eyes, challenge the man’s parents, but they are afraid of the consequences of the new truth. But the clarity with which the formerly blind man now sees is undeniable and he is not cowed by the authorities.
It may be that we are overhearing arguments about the significance of Jesus that were going on at the time John was writing. The followers of Christ who had never “seen” what the point of life was are suddenly able to “see” and are free from the darkness of being overwhelmed by the evil around. Nothing will deter them from insisting upon the validity of the new “sight” they have received. Not even threats of being expelled from their community will stop them proclaiming this new insight.
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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