Saturday February 22 Epiphany 6
Click here for simplified daily office prayers
Psalm 107 Part 2
When the Israelites completed their journey through the wilderness God brought disaster on the evil people who lived there (as the Israelites understood them) to make a fertile place for God’s own people. When God’s people were oppressed, God rescued them. Wise people, the poem says, will take this to heart and will trust in God’s care and justice to prevail.
One of our tasks today is to cultivate that trust in God’s care for humanity so that when disaster happens in our world we will have something solid to offer.
Psalm 108
I will praise God because God is so powerful and I ask you, God, to act on behalf of the poor. God replies by listing all ways in which land will be given to God’s people and taken from those who are evil. I respond by asking God to act to save us because it seems God has abandoned us.
These two psalms are often scheduled for Saturdays while Christ is still in the grave and we wait for the resurrection.
Isaiah 66: 1-6 What’s Isaiah about?
When God restores the city of Jerusalem, the people are to trust in God’s power, not in the empty repetition of religious ritual which is an abomination. God will mock their sacrifices unless they trust in God to rescue them. Religion is not a substitute for God. This would have been a shocking stance at a time when sacrifices were the most holy thing a person could do.
Mark 12: 35-44 What’s Mark about?
It is now Jesus’ turn to challenge the leaders. He uses what to us is an obscure riddle — he asks who is the “Lord” referred to in Psalm 110? It was supposed that King David wrote the psalms and at one point “Lord” seems to refer to an ancestor of the ancient King David, but a moment later “Lord” refers to the messiah who is expected to arrive in Jesus’ near future—a thousand years after David. There appears to be a contradiction in scripture. Jesus is making an obscure grammatical argument to reject the official belief, based on this psalm, that the messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Why would Jesus argue against the messiah being born in Bethlehem? He may be deliberately undermining the arguments of the religious leaders who have abandoned loyalty to the messiah (the “Lord” of the psalm) for loyalty to the wealth and power of Rome. Their lives are in contradiction just as the psalm is. Whatever the original point was, the people experience their oppressive leaders being bested by Jesus in this argument.
Jesus then goes on to criticize the religious leaders who make themselves rich at the expense of the very poor—Jesus draws attention to a very poor woman who puts a tiny offering into the temple collection and Jesus says it is worth more than what all the rich people gave because it was everything she owned. Valuing a penniless woman above the wealthy male leaders was an unimaginable insult. Jesus is clear that cultivating generosity and dying to greed is the way into God’s kingdom, not the life-style of the wealthy oppressors. No wonder he will be executed in a couple of days.
This concludes our readings from Mark’s gospel. In preparation for Lent we will read the “Sermon on the Mount” from Matthew, and during Lent we read from John. On Sundays in Lent we will continue to read from Mark’s gospel.
This week’s collect:
Almighty and everliving God,
whose Son Jesus Christ healed the sick
and restored them to wholeness of life,
look with compassion on the anguish of the world,
and by your power make whole all peoples and nations;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.