Tuesday August 6 Pentecost 11
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Psalm 78 Part 1
This poem speaks of how God showered the people with constant protection and generosity as God held the sea back so they could escape from their slavery in Egypt, and continued to protect them and miraculously feed them in the desert. But the people continued to distrust this God of justice and inclusion for all. There are consequences, as always, for unjust exploitative behaviour, but God does not abandon the people, even though they have abandoned God’s call to justice. So God continues to care because God makes care of the weakest a priority.
In effect, this is the basic creed of the ancient Israelites. If it were our basic belief today, what a difference that would make to our personal and international life.
Judges 7.1-18 What’s Judges about?
Gideon has 33,000 troops to defeat Midian but God is concerned they will think they gained victory by their own strength, and the numbers are reduced to only 300 who drank water as animals do, and not upright as alert soldiers do—these are the weakest soldiers. Gideon is still afraid until he sneaks into the Midianites’ camp and overhears a dream that predicts his victory. Gideon arranges that in the night the 300 soldiers will surround the camp and shout and blow trumpets as the Israelites did at Jericho when they first entered the land.
By making Gideon’s army tiny, and by responding to Gideon’s fear the story is saying that our fear and our weakness never prevents God from carrying out God’s commitment to us.
John 1.19-28 What’s John about?
At the time John was writing his gospel there were followers of John the Baptist who felt John had been a more effective leader than Jesus and had been the real messiah. They argued that because John had been determined to overthrow the Romans and because John had invented the symbolic action of crossing the Jordan as a way of claiming the land back from the Romans. They argued that both John the Baptist and Jesus had been executed by the Romans for their faithfulness to God.
This image of pointing not to our selves but to Jesus as the source of death and resurrection became a central theme of faithful discipleship—we acknowledge that we live and are rescued not by our own moral power, but by God’s initiative.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son Jesus Christ fed the hungry
with the bread of his life
and the word of his kingdom.
Renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weakness
sustain us by your true and living bread,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.