Wednesday July 17 Pentecost 8
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Psalm 38
I have caused my own downfall, people take advantage of me, and even friends have abandoned me. I remain silent because there is nothing left to do but to hope in God. Help me, God!
Joshua 3.1-13 What’s Joshua about?
Joshua prepares for the ark to cross the Jordan river into the promised land. The ark contains the original 10 commandments in stone as well as Moses’ written law—to take these God-given sacred objects into a new land is to claim the land for God and themselves. God will repeat what happened at the Red Sea—the Jordan River will stop flowing to allow the Israelites to pass through.
Notice that God is described as “Lord of all the earth”—a global concept of God that probably arose a thousand years later when the Israelites were being released from captivity by the foreign king Cyrus. Those who compiled the stories at that time probably brought their own understanding of God as the sole global power to these ancient stories which had originally thought of there being a separate god for each nation.
Matthew 25.31-46 What’s Matthew about?
This vision of the ultimate moral reckoning concludes Matthew’s series of images about the end of the world. The story of the sheep and the goats says that to have cared for unimportant people is to have fulfilled our humanity, and not to have done so is to have destroyed our humanity.
But since we would like to think we have a relationship with Jesus, the story suggests that caring for the poorest is the equivalent to knowing Jesus. Why? Because Jesus embodied God’s love for all, and became poor himself, so not to care for the poorest implies we aren’t interested in Jesus’s priority of care for all, and that is to exclude ourselves from full life. In the story that is described as “eternal punishment,” but we understand that not as God being angry at us, but as our bringing loneliness and meaningless upon ourselves. We see that today in the endless pursuit of more wealth and power by those who are already extremely wealthy—ironically they are experiencing loneliness and powerlessness which they have brought upon themselves by not caring.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless
until they find their rest in you.
May we find peace in your service,
and in the world to come, see you face to face;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.