Wednesday November 10 Pentecost 24
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Psalm 81
Praise to God because this is what we heard God saying: God longs that the people would respond so that God could give them everything they need.
Psalm 82
God is accusing all the other gods who do not care for the poor. Hurry up, God, and take your place as the just ruler of the whole world.
There are many gods today who care nothing for the poor. We, too, are to cultivate longing for the God of justice to rule.
Nehemiah 7: 73- 8: 18 What’s Nehemiah about?
Nehemiah reads the first 5 books of the Bible, the Torah. This story provides instructions (“be sure people understand the meaning”) and a rationale for how the Torah is still to be read aloud. The people hear again how they are to live. They are at first sad to learn how faithless they have been, but are instructed to rejoice because now they know what God wants. They re-start the feast of booths which had long been neglected—they build booths in which to live for a week as a way of remembering how they were a pilgrim people in the wilderness.
This concludes our readings about how the temple was rebuilt and the worship of God was re-established 500 years before Jesus. For the next week we will be reading about the revolt against Greek rule led by the Maccabean brothers.
Matthew 15: 29-39 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus is in non-Jewish territory and is healing people who were the descendants of the people the Jews were commanded to wipe out when they entered the land after escaping from Egypt. After healing everyone, Jesus feeds an enormous crowd of these unclean people using seven loaves. When they have all eaten seven baskets are left over. The repetition of the number “seven” refers to the seven nations that were to have been annihilated by the ancient Israelites and who were considered in Jesus’ time to be abominations. For traditional Jewish leaders these were acts of radical defiance of the Bible and God’s demands for purity. Jesus has already just healed a child of a woman descended from those nations.
God’s priorities are breaking through into the world in ways that had been unimaginable. Are we anticipating the same thing happening in our time?
This week’s collect:
Eternal God,
who caused all holy scriptures
to be written for our learning,
grant us so to hear them,
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,
that we may embrace and ever hold fast
the blessed hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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