Monday September 6 Pentecost 15
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Psalm 41
Just as we care for the poor and needy, so God cares for us. I am needy in that I have sinned and my enemies and even my friends are all conspiring against me and hoping that I will die. All I can do is trust that God will protect me.
When we, or our world, seem to have little hope, we ground ourselves in knowing God holds us fast.
Psalm 52
Cruel powerful people seem to run the world, but we trust that God will enable the world to be as fertile as a green olive tree and evil will be ended.
1 Kings 13: 1-10 What’s Kings about?
An un-named prophet challenges King Jeroboam for setting up an alternate altar, and the king’s hand withers when he points to the prophet to execute him. The king repents and God restores his hand, but the prophet refuses to accept honours from the king.
There are consequences for abandoning the God of justice, but although God is always ready to receive the king back, God cannot remove the inevitable consequences. The writers are suggesting that had the kings ruled with faithful justice, the northern part of the country, ruled by Jeroboam at that time, would never have been devastated by Assyria.
Mark 15: 40-47 What’s Mark about?
Jesus is buried with a dignity that later Christians would have wanted him to have had. But in fact, the Romans would never have allowed such kindness and dignity for someone crucified—the whole point of crucifixion was to utterly destroy the person and their body and probably to have even prevented burial—that would have been experienced by Jews of the time as an abomination. Christians at the time of Mark’s gospel could no longer bear the thought of Jesus being treated with such devastating contempt. They were suggesting that the resurrection was already starting through this imaginary dignified burial.
Our honouring of the God we worship through Jesus should not blind us to the extraordinary lengths to which God is prepared to go to remain faithful to us.
This week’s collect:
Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people,
that richly bearing the fruit of good works,
we may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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