Tuesday October 15 Pentecost 21
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Psalm 5
There is evil all around, but I will go into your presence, O God, and know that you are more powerful than all evil and will protect us.
Psalm 6
I have been hounded almost to death, help me, God. Thanks be to God that God heard me and the evil people will be overcome.
Jonah 1.1-17a What’s Jonah about?
This book was written during the occupation by the Greek empire, about 300 years before Christ, and tells an imaginary story set in a time 400 years earlier. Although Jonah is famous for being swallowed by a whale, the point of the book is that Jonah is reluctant to imagine that God can be generous to non-Jews. This generosity toward non-Jews would have been a useful directive for Jews living under Greek rule.
The book opens with Jonah refusing to go to the non-Jewish city of Nineveh to encourage them to repent and so be saved. Jonah flees by ship from God’s command, but cannot avoid God. God sends a storm which swamps the ship Jonah is in. Curiously Jonah is asleep during the storm, and the captain asks if he cares. The details are so similar to Jesus being asleep in a boat during a storm that it may be the account of Jesus in the storm may be influenced by this story. Jonah admits the storm is his fault for fleeing God, and asks to be thrown overboard so the sailors can be saved. As with Jesus, the storm immediately ceases. The pagan sailors, like the disciples much later, now believe in the Jewish God. To prevent Jonah from drowning God provides a great fish which swallows Jonah to keep him safe.
We may refuse to carry out some generosity that God has in store for us to do, but God will provide another opportunity.
Luke 8.40-56 What’s Luke about?
Jesus heals two women—the adult has been suffering from a menstrual disease which has made her an outcast from society and her own family and has prevented her from being treated as a full adult person. The girl, born at the same time as the older woman had become ill, is on the verge of adulthood and also in danger of never becoming an adult. Jesus ensures that both these two women are restored to their full dignity as women.
The story is about how the kingdom is arriving in which God’s care restores what has been lost in our lives and overcomes even the way failure is internalized by people who are oppressed. Good news indeed!
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
in our baptism you adopted us for your own.
Quicken, we pray, your Spirit within us,
that we, being renewed both in body and mind,
may worship you in sincerity and truth;
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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