Wednesday July 3 Pentecost 6
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Psalm 128
Joy and prosperity come for those who seek God’s justice. Although the imagery is of abundance in family life, we may also experience that abundance in our sense of being full persons as we deepen our ability to care.
Psalm 129
We have been oppressed since our youth, but God ensures those who oppressed us will be defeated. They will be as useless and as stunted as stray wheat growing on a roof, and nobody will wish them well.
We may have confidence that evil directions in our world will come to nothing.
Psalm 130
There isn’t much hope of us getting things right by ourselves. But I am waiting, as if in the darkness of night for the tiniest glimmer of dawn, for God to bring God’s loving kingdom into being.
Numbers 22.41-23.12 What’s Numbers about?
The king of Moab arranges for seven ritual sacrifices to prepare for Balaam to curse Israel using the power of wizardry. But first Balaam consults God who gives him a message for the king. The message comes in the form of an ancient poem celebrating Israel’s survival in face of attack. We are hearing Israel’s discovery that there is only one God to whom they, as well as foreigners, are accountable.
It would have been immensely encouraging for readers struggling with the overwhelming power of the Babylonians who had enslaved them, to hear how a non-Jew a thousand years earlier could be so committed to obey the God of Israel. The idea of powerful foreigners obeying the God of Israel may have originated from the Babylonian king Cyrus who released the Jews from slavery in Babylon so they could return to their land and provide crops for his military expeditions. However, the Jews interpreted this support from a non-believing emperor as the astonishing discovery that God could guide global events far beyond Israel to fulfil the ancient promises of a permanent home for God’s people.
Their insight could be very helpful in our time of global threats.
Matthew 21.33-46 What’s Matthew about?
As the religious leaders continue to reject God’s call to a world of inclusion and dignity for all, Jesus tells a story about the consequences to renters of attempting to kill the family who own the vineyard they are renting.
It may be that the story was intended to apply to the Roman empire which had occupied the land (“the vineyard”). Forty years after Jesus’ execution, the Roman army dismantled the enormous stones of which the temple had been constructed and rolled them down the temple hill deliberately crushing the Jewish leadership assembled below. Matthew, writing his gospel perhaps twenty years later may be collecting Hebrew Bible verses which he understands Jesus would have said not long before his execution, thus predicting both his own disaster and that of the Jewish nation forty years later. Matthew wants his readers, all Jews, to know that God will finally be victorious in justice despite both those horrors.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have taught us through your Son
that love fulfills the law.
May we love you with all our heart,
all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength,
and may we love our neighbour as ourselves;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.