Monday April 22 Easter 4
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Psalm 44
This is a psalm for times when bad things happen to us when it’s not our fault. The psalm starts off by recounting how God did amazing things for us in the past—God rescued us out of Egypt through the Red Sea. But now God no longer cares for us and terrible things are happening to us, even though we have done nothing wrong. At the end the psalm says there is nothing to do but call on God to put things right.
Exodus 32.1-20 What’s Exodus about?
Immediately after the people have received God’s covenant to live in justice, they place their trust in money to save them. They bow down and worship gold, made from the gold which was thrust upon them by their Egyptian owners, and which they now melt into the form of a calf. Note that a major stock exchange uses the same symbol today—a bull. This rejection of God’s covenant of justice and their transference of trust in greed becomes a central theme of the Hebrew Bible.
This theme of the people’s faithlessness is repeated in stories, set a thousand years later, of the growing injustice by their kings, leading inevitably to the disaster of being conquered in 600 B.C.
God is portrayed as wrathful in intending disaster to the people for worshipping gold, and later in allowing the Babylonian disaster of their second enslavement. Moses argues with God not to destroy the people. The writer imagines God has an inner struggle as to whether to permit the consequences of their selfishness or to be loyal to the eternal covenant to remain faithful to them regardless of their behaviour. It’s a way of pointing out that if we take advantage of God’s faithfulness to us, or presume that faithfulness is simple or automatic, disaster will ensue.
That disaster, and the interpretation that God is vengeful is simply a way of saying that to forsake justice for all is the path to horror, disaster, and ultimate destruction which humanity brings upon ourselves. How clearly we see that working out in our time.
Moses breaks the stones on which God had written the path to justice in the form of the Ten Commandments, not because Moses has a fit of anger but as a symbolic statement that the people have destroyed the covenant God had initiated.
Matthew 5.1-10 What’s Matthew about?
Matthew deliberately has Jesus imitate Moses by giving a new set of the ten commandments on a mountain. One translation suggests that “Blessed are the poor” can be more clearly worded as “Congratulations, poor people,” and “Blessed are those who weep” as “Congratulations you who are in grief….” Jesus’ original claim was that when you are in deep need, you become aware of God’s generosity and know that you are safe and loved. Congratulations, indeed, if you know that! And you probably know it because you’ve been in deep need.
Luke emphasizes the extraordinary nature of these new commandments for living life by adding a further statement: “Woe to you who are rich” meaning when you are wealthy you are the object of pity: “My deepest condolences if you are wealthy…” Such statements are still shocking to us but the truth is that if we are wealthy and have not worked for justice and shared one’s goods, the only thing you have left to trust is your wealth. And wealth is notoriously fickle.
This week’s collect:
O God of peace,
who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ,
that great shepherd of the sheep,
by the blood of the eternal covenant,
make us perfect in every good work to do your will,
and work in us that which is well-pleasing in your sight;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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