Saturday April 20 Easter 3
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Psalm 42
When I am very discouraged, I will remember to put my trust in God. The refrains in these two psalms are said by many Christian priests before presiding at the Eucharist to confess their own sins and to trust in God.
Psalm 43
This psalm is said by many Christian priests as they prepare to go to the altar to preside at a eucharist.
Exodus 25.1-22 What’s Exodus about?
The Israelites understood that in the ten commandments God had entered into a gift-agreement with them, called a “covenant.” In a covenant God decides to be generous without receiving anything in return. The commitment is to be their God and lead them to their own land regardless of whether the people are loyal to God. In contrast, a contract would have meant that God got worship and in return the people got land and either side could end the contract. But their experience was that God’s involvement arose solely from pure generosity. This was such an astonishing idea that they later built the Jerusalem temple to celebrate that generosity.
Today we read the instructions about how a portable wooden box (the “ark”) was built with immensely valuable materials to carry the original stones of the ten commandments—the written covenant that God had committed to for justice and dignity for everyone. The elaborate and expensive construction indicated how immensely valuable were the Commandments about justice and fairness for everyone.
What we hear sometimes as threats by God were intended not as God being angry, but as warnings about the destructive consequences of the people not being equally generous in their own lives.
Two thousand years later, Jesus is angry about money changers in that temple. The entire purpose of the temple was to uphold justice and care for the weakest as described by the commandments in the ark housed in the temple, but the religious leaders had turned the temple into a money-making institution and an instrument of Roman oppression.
Matthew 4.18-25 What’s Matthew about?
Immediately after Jesus has begun embodying God’s kingdom through his refusal to participate in the violence of the world, he gathers a community around him and soon the kingdom is breaking out into healing and new life for everyone around them, even for people who were not Jews and not followers of the Jewish God.
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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