Thursday October 21 Pentecost 21
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Psalm 37 Part 2
God always rescues and protects those who are just, and the powerful evil people will soon be brought to nothing. There is some daring imagery – evil people are imaged as a field in full harvest and as healthy trees – evil does seem to flourish sometimes.
Ezra 1: 1-11 What’s Ezra about?
For the next three weeks we read from two books, Ezra and Nehemiah, describing how Jerusalem and the temple were re-built, and the issues that arose.
God uses King Cyrus of Persia, a major world power who had probably never heard of the Jewish God of justice, to defeat the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem. To imagine that the local Jewish God could control a major super-power was an enormous step forward in understanding that the God of justice was the God of the universe.
This was the greatest rescue in the history of Israel and it was on the basis of this event that the Jews then interpreted the whole of world history. It was this intervention by God, despite the people’s long abandonment of God, that gave rise to their understanding of God’s faithfulness. They then looked back in their history and applied that idea of God’s faithfulness despite human unfaithfulness to major events in the past. They saw God’s faithfulness in their escape from Egypt through the Red Sea, in God’s promise of a permanent home and land to Abraham, and in God’s victory over the flood with Noah when God promised humanity would never be destroyed despite human evil.
Matthew 12: 15-21 What’s Matthew about?
In response to the growing plot to kill him, Jesus quotes from the Hebrew Bible, as he often does in Matthew’s gospel, to show that he is truly sent by God to initiate the kingdom of justice far beyond the boarders of God’s ancient people.
This week’s collect:
Almighty and everliving God,
increase in us your gift of faith,
that forsaking what lies behind
and reaching out to what is before,
we may run the way of your commandments
and win the crown of everlasting joy;
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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