Friday August 20 Pentecost 12
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Psalm 141
Help me to be faithful to you, O God, and not be caught in evil.
Psalm 143
I am almost crushed by my enemy, and by my own weakness. But I remember how good you were in the past, and I still hope in you. Otherwise, there is no hope.
2 Samuel 19: 24-43 What’s Samuel about?
David is generous to the leaders of the people who are welcoming him back to Jerusalem. But the people of northern Israel complain that David is showing favouritism to the people of Judah in the south where he is from.
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 — who is the “Lord” mentioned in Psalm 110? 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 the near future—a thousand years after David. Jesus seems to be using an obscure grammatical argument to critique 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 authority of the religious leaders who have abandoned loyalty to the messiah for loyalty to the wealth and power of Rome. Whatever the original point was, the people experience their oppressive leaders being bested in the argument and they are delighted.
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. Praising a penniless woman above the wealthy male leaders was an unimaginable insult to them. 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 week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
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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