Tuesday April 30 Easter 5
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Psalm 68
A song of joy that God drives away evil and cares for the needy just as God rescued God’s people long ago from Egypt and drove out all the other kings so they could settle in the land God had promised. Can we cultivate the expectation that God will triumph over all the selfish international powers of our day?
The violent images part way through are a way of expressing how completely God’s goodness and justice will remove all evil and exploitative powers.
Leviticus 16.20-34 What’s Leviticus about?
Here are more details about how the people are reconciled to God and how God will completely forgive them when they have abandoned God’s justice. The actual sins are to be carried away by a goat into the wilderness, and the goat is to be set free there—notice how the goat is treated with justice.
Valuable animals are to be given to God as a sign of how genuine the people are their desire to return to God’s ways. Once a year in the seventh month, which represents the Sabbath of months just as the seventh day happens every week, full reconciliation to God is celebrated and nobody is enslaved to anyone, and all creation is fulfilled the way God intended it to be when the world was first created.
Matthew 6.7-15 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus continues his request that prayer and religion not be centred on selfishness, by teaching the disciples his prayer. This is a slightly longer version than the one in Luke’s gospel, and this has become the standard one used in worship.
Jesus’ prayer moves from praise of God immediately to asking that, just as in heaven, God’s will and kingdom of love should actually happen here on earth—the Greek says, “As already in heaven, may your will and rule happen on earth.” It then illustrates what that means: we all should have enough to eat but not to try to hoard food so others can’t get it (“bread” likely also meant “justice”), then we are to ask for reconciliation with God and with others (by cancelling the financial and moral debts others owe to us), and finally we ask not to be drawn into acting with violence to support God (“lead us not into temptation”—God would never try to make us do evil, so this likely means not to allow us to follow our false ideas of God that support our desires to do injustices) and to keep us from doing violence to anyone (“deliver us from evil” likely meant “keep us from doing the evils of violence or injustice”).
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
Give us grace to love one another
and walk in the way of his commandments,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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