Saturday March 26 Lent 3
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Psalm 87
A vision of Jerusalem as the source of life for all the world, as if every nation and every beautiful thing originated there. Christians might interpret this as Jesus’ death and resurrection in Jerusalem being the source of life and beauty for the whole world.
Psalm 90
Our lives are very short, like a breath we are gone, we are so insignificant. Bless us, God.
Genesis 47.27- 48.7 What’s Genesis about?
Jacob prepares to die, and requires that he be buried not in Egypt but in the land that God had promised. By being buried there he ensures that God’s promise is carried out there and not in Egypt.
Jacob adopts two of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh to become founders of tribes. However, since Jacob already had twelve sons it may be that we are encountering here an alternate version ancient memory of how the twelve tribes originated. One of Ephraim’s descendants, Joshua, will finally lead the people into the land God promised.
Mark 7.1-23 What’s Mark about?
Jesus is in conflict with the religious leaders. They believe that loyalty to God is expressed through religious ritual such as ritual washing before eating. This washing was purely a holiness ceremony, not our modern washing for the purpose of sanitation. Jesus insists that justice, in caring for parents for example, trumps religious holiness. Finally, Jesus teaches that holiness does not originate in being religious, but about the love or lack of love that comes from inside us.
In the next passage which we will read on Monday Jesus will provide healing to the ultimately unclean person—a non-Jewish woman. No wonder those in religious power react by attacking the one who is distributing the power of God’s embrace to everyone.
This week’s collect:
Father of mercy,
alone we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.
When we are discouraged by our weakness,
strengthen us to follow Christ,
our pattern and our hope;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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re: “What’s Mark about”
If Mark was the first gospel written, and “over time these stories about Jesus were organized and eventually written down in the order they were usually told in”, I’m wondering how is it Matthew became the first book of the New Testament?
Great question, Donna! The four gospels were written between 70 AD and 120 AD. In the mid-100’s (a hundred years after Jesus’ life on earth) the early Christians were collecting the scrolls that they had inherited—the four gospels, and the letters written by Paul. By that time nobody knew in which order they had been written. Matthew was the most popular gospel at that time, perhaps because he quotes the Hebrew Bible so frequently (far more than any of the other gospels) so that may have given the early Christians the idea that his was the most reliable gospel. So they placed it first.
Something similar happened with the epistles and the order of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible. In those days people thought that a long scroll must be more important than a short scroll, so the longer epistles (e.g. Romans) come first and the shortest of Paul’s epistles (To Philemon) is placed last, even though we know know that Philemon was likely one of the earliest letters, and Romans likely one of the last. The same thing happened with the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible—they are arranged in order of length, not by topic or date that they were written. So the longest prophet (Isaiah with 66 chapters) comes first then the next longest (Jeremiah and Lamentations), and the shortest prophets with only four or five chapters (Haggai has only two) come at the end.
In one sense it doesn’t matter whether one knows this or not, but in another sense it’s very important because we now know what order they were written in and the approximate dates, and that helps us understand what issues and challenges the different gospels and different epistles and different prophets were concerned with. And that helps us better interpret what those writings were trying to say, and how they might relate to the problems of our time.
The words of Psalm 90 call to mind Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s words, (which Dean Peter often echoed as a benediction): “Life is short. And we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.”
Sound advice!