Wednesday August 28 Pentecost 14
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Psalm 12
Everyone has abandoned truth and justice. I stand alone against this injustice. It is when God sees injustice that God acts. Save us, God, evil is prevailing.
Psalm 13
God seems to be absent, and not helping, but I long that God will. Then I will rejoice!
Psalm 14
Everybody has abandoned the God of justice. When God acts there will be great rejoicing.
Job 6.1, 7.1-21 What’s Job about?
Job complains that God is implacable in abandoning us and subjecting humanity to forces we cannot possibly resist. Could God not just look away and let us die? God could just forgive us and have done with it. Any sin people commit cannot hurt God, and so even if we sin, that is no reason for God to treat us so callously since we will all be dead soon anyway. Since we are of such short life, and worth so little compared to God, it’s not fair that God should prolong our misery. We’ve done nothing to deserve that.
John 7.1-13 What’s John about?
Jesus’ brothers, who do not believe him, urge him to attend a major festival in Jerusalem. That way he can prove to them that he is who he says he is. Jesus refuses, demonstrating that he is not controlled by other people’s expectations. But then he attends secretly, showing that he is free to voluntarily move towards his death which will happen in Jerusalem. Twice, Jesus says that his time had not yet come—meaning that he and his Father are in charge of history and how events transpire, and his brothers and the religious leaders are not. Controversy about him is growing, some believing he is genuine, others that he is a charlatan, just as was the case for the early Christians when John was writing.
John often uses phrases such as “…for fear of the Jews.” At the time, Jesus’ execution was arranged by Jewish leaders who owed their position to the Roman governor, but when John wrote his gospel perhaps a hundred years later and Judaism was widely rejecting the followers of Jesus, John uses the term “the Jews” in a way that can be misleading for us. We would be better to understand the phrase as “…the Jewish religious leaders” whenever John writes about “the Jews.”
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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