Tuesday March 30 Tuesday in Holy Week
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Psalm 6
I have been hounded almost to death, help me, God. Thanks be to God that God heard me.
All the psalms this week reflect the approaching killing of Jesus and can express our own confrontations with betrayal and abuse.
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.
Jeremiah 15: 10-21
Jeremiah complains to God that he is being persecuted for telling the truth and that God has abandoned him for no reason—he accuses God of being unfaithful like a stream that dries up in summer when you really need it. God responds by promising to make Jeremiah the one who tells the truth to the people and to protect him from those who would destroy him for telling the truth about their having abandoned justice and brought on themselves the disaster of being enslaved in Babylon.
John 12: 20-26
During the Passover (the festival of liberation from slavery) Jesus explains to Greek worshippers that his purpose is to be a grain of wheat being planted and so by dying to become an immense harvest. He means that losing one’s life for love is the only way to experience deep life. He describes his coming death as his glory—the fulfilment of his purpose which is to love the world without any limit to his self-offering.
The idea of such love accepting a horrific death as the way to life would have been particularly strange to the Greeks who believed that people are essentially souls for whom physical life is less important and that human ingenuity and military power could ensure a fulfilled future. The same unfortunate illusions that sacrificial love can be avoided (by being religious like Greek philosophy or by trusting in the power of violence like all empires) remain widespread today. But we can have real life (“eternal life” as the Bible puts it) only through deeply loving which always involves joyful sacrifice.
This week’s collect:
O God,
by the passion of your blessed Son,
you made an instrument of shameful death
to be for us the means of life.
May our lives be so transformed by his passion
that we may witness to his grace;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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