Tuesday September 7 Pentecost 15
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Psalm 45
A poem about King David, using the imagery of an ancient oriental king, describing his personal and public magnificence and the glory of his relationship with the queen. Note that his prime duty is to serve truth and justice.
We can read this poem as a description of our own fulfilled self and relationships which have been made possible for us in union with Christ’s resurrection.
1 Kings 16: 23-34 What’s Kings about?
We have skipped over two chapters describing further evil done by Jeroboam (king of the north, “Israel”) and his descendants. We now come to King Omri, one of the subsequent kings, whose disloyalty to the God of justice consisisted of founding the city of Samaria which will become the site of the competing Jewish temple and thus the source of hatred by Jerusalem Jews in the south even in the time of Jesus. A tiny Samaritan Jewish community continues to this day.
When Omri dies he is succeeded by his son Ahab who married a foreign woman who follows disgusting rituals. The writers of these stories understood that God had expressly forbidden marriage outside Judaism probably because during the seventy years in Babylon (four hundred years after the events in the stories) such assimilation had been happening. Even worse, child sacrifice is practised at the founding of Jericho.
The writers expect us to anticipate that God will intervene, and tomorrow we will begin reading the saga of how Elijah embodied God’s challenge against Ahab’s descent into injustice.
Mark 16: 1-8(9-20) What’s Mark about?
Mark has no appearance of the risen Jesus. It may be that Mark wanted the listeners—who are us—to be the ones proclaiming the resurrection as Jesus’ risen life appears in our own lives. The remainder of the text, after verse 8, was added later and was not part of Mark’s gospel.
This concludes our readings from Mark’s gospel. Tomorrow we begin reading through Matthew’s gospel.
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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