Friday July 23 Pentecost 8
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Psalm 51
I have committed evil acts and I long that God will wash me clean. If I am forgiven, I will tell everyone of God’s goodness. I would have given expensive sacrifices, but what you want, O God, is that I change my priorities. Then God will be pleased with us and our religious practices.
This psalm is often used on Fridays, the anniversary of the death of Christ through which forgiveness is possible. Our world would receive new life if we were as committed to changing direction in matters which are bringing death to the planet.
1 Samuel 31: 1-13 What’s Samuel about?
As Samuel had predicted, the Philistines defeat the Israelites, kill all Saul’s sons, including Jonathan, and Saul takes his own life thus denying the Philistines the ultimate victory, showing that God remains mindful of God’s original choice of king. Some brave Israelites retrieve Saul’s body and give him a full burial, thus honouring God’s choice of king. The writers five centuries later understood this disaster to have been the consequence of Saul’s refusal to trust his life to God’s justice, repeated by subsequent kings, a disaster which they had experienced in their country’s horrific defeat by Babylon. Because Saul and all his sons are killed, David can receive the royal house which God had originally established under Saul without violating God’s original intention.
Mark 5: 21-43 What’s Mark about?
Jesus has calmed a storm on a lake, then inside a person, and now calms social storms around two women both of whom have had adulthood denied to them. The older woman was an outcast because of her constant menstrual bleeding and because this illness meant she could never have children. She would be considered a failure, hardly even an adult because having a child is what made a woman a full adult in the ancient world. Around this story Mark wraps another story about a young woman unable to become an adult. Jesus heals a 12 year old girl, born the year the other woman first became ill, who at the point of death would have had adulthood snatched from her.
Jesus is healing the things that keep us from being our full mature selves – particularly those who are most vulnerable such as women in the ancient world. These healings are more than of individual bodies—Jesus is also healing the body of society by restoring people to full life and participation.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son has opened for us
a new and living way into your presence.
Give us pure hearts and constant wills
to worship you in spirit and in truth;
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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