Tuesday August 31 Pentecost 14
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Psalm 26
I do not sit down with the wicked: this gives us words to say how we wish to live, that deep in our heart we really are such people as keep God’s commands to love and do justice. “My foot stands on level ground” because we ground our lives on the solid base of justice.
Psalm 28
Like many psalms, this asks that the wicked be punished: “give them their just deserts.” (“Deserts” is “What is deserved,” not miles of sand or misspelled sweets!) This desire for evil people to be destroyed seems very unlike Jesus’ request that we forgive our enemies and love them, but it is really giving us words to express our own intense desire that oppressive and violent policies should come to an end. We might pray, “May any international trade agreements that make the poor even poorer, be utterly done away with.” The violent images in many psalms are not to ask God to be violent, but to ask that all evil actions and policies be completely defeated so people around the world can live in peace and fulfilment. The second half of the psalm gives thanks that God has indeed been victorious over oppression.
1 Kings 8: 65—9:9 What’s Kings about?
God accepts the temple and promises to uphold the people unless they follow unjust foreign gods. Solomon is warned that the temple will be destroyed if the people follow gods of greed instead of the God of inclusive justice. We are hearing the writers, working four hundred years later, saying that the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians was caused by the kings and the people abandoning justice.
Mark 14: 66-72 What’s Mark about?
Peter betrays Jesus as deliberately as Judas did—to save his life, Peter takes a solemn oath that he never heard of Jesus.
This passage provides credibility to the account—the early Christians who wrote the gospel would not have told stories that made their leaders look so completely like failures unless people knew it had happened. We are as reluctant as Peter to take Jesus’ total commitment seriously, yet through the power of Jesus’ resurrection Peter and the others became loyal and effective beyond their wildest imaginings. The same can happen to us.
This week’s collect:
Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
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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