Friday April 19 Easter 3
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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.
Exodus 24.1-18 What’s Exodus about?
Moses has shared God’s expectations with the people who then solemnly commit themselves in sacrifice ceremonies to living out God’s expectation of justice. The people are overwhelmed by the grandeur of God who has come so close to them. The life of justice is not an airy ideal, but a reality just a heartbeat away. That it is possible that the power behind the universe could approach us is as overwhelming as thunder and cloud on a mountain.
In modern times we know that the more a society allows a growing gap between people who have become increasingly wealthy and others who live in increasing poverty, the more that society will become unstable. While this story is set in the social circumstances of an ancient people, it remains true today that sacrifice will be needed to re-establish justice in human society and with the society of all living things.
Notice that God calls Moses on the seventh day Moses is on the mountain—the seventh day is the Sabbath when God had completed the whole of creation in goodness and beauty. God is about to provide the people with the Ten Commandments which will guide them back to the original glory and dignity for all people and creatures.
Matthew 4.12-17 What’s Matthew about?
After John the Baptist is executed, Jesus withdraws to Galilee, far from the Jordan where John had been active. As he often does, Matthew quotes the Hebrew Bible to prove that Jesus was foretold in their holy texts and thus is truly sent by God. As in Mark’s gospel (the earliest), Matthew has Jesus’ first teaching being the announcement that God’s heavenly rule is very close to happening. For people destitute and oppressed by the cruelty of the Roman empire, this was very good news indeed, and is consistent with the expectation initiated by John the Baptist (by crossing into the promised land) that God was about to overthrow the Romans.
John is about to be executed for encouraging people to anticipate the overthrow of Rome, and now Jesus takes up the same theme. The implication is that the same outcome may happen to him, too.
This week’s collect:
O God,
your Son made himself known to his disciples
in the breaking of bread.
Open the eyes of our faith,
that we may see him in his redeeming work,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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