Friday January 6 Epiphany
Click here for simplified daily office prayers
Psalm 46
Neither storms of water or storms of war will shake me because I know that God is behind all the world. Like a river flowing through the city, God is always in our midst. The refrain, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.” expresses this confidence over and over.
Psalm 97
God’s power in creation is an expression of God’s commitment to justice—righteousness and justice are the foundations of God’s throne (the same image is used in Psalm 89) and therefore of all creation. We can count on God to uphold those who are without power as surely as we experience enormous power in creation. A wonderful image for our age when science shows us so much power in creation – dignity and justice are equally embedded in the way the world is put together.
Isaiah 52: 7-10 What’s Isaiah about?
We now return to Isaiah, and read from the middle section of the book, written by another person, known as Second Isaiah who lived 100 years later than when the first section of the book was written. The Jews have been enslaved in Babylon for a generation and are losing their identity as a separate people, when King Cyrus of Persia conquers the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem.
Because Cyrus had never heard of, and could care less about, and did not believe in, the Jewish God, and because there were no prophecies in the Jewish scriptures about such a major event, it could look as if God had nothing to do with this happy outcome—that it was just an historical accident. So Isaiah is faced with two problems—that there are no prophecies about this rescue of the people, and that Cyrus has no interest in doing the will have the God of Israel: so is this the will have God or is it pure accident? Second Isaiah solves the two problems at one stroke with a new idea about how God exercises rules the world. Isaiah’s new idea is that God has power over foreign unbelieving kings without them even knowing, and that God could do something totally new and completely outside the scriptures. This radical new approach to understanding how God works in human history could be a template for how we think in new ways about how God acts in our modern world.
This passage is a hymn of joy at the people’s imminent return to Jerusalem, and at the same time an affirmation of God’s ability to act beyond all expectations.
Over the next month we will see Isaiah using a variety of images to repeatedly present his revolutionary argument for a whole new way of understanding how God is present on a global scale.
Matthew 12: 14-21 What’s Matthew about?
The religious leaders have just rejected Jesus for “working” on the Sabbath by healing someone’s hand. Matthew contrasts their rejection of God’s generosity in Jesus with God’s openness to non-Jews. He quotes Isaiah who understood God as being interested in non-Jews, and this revolutionary attitude may lie behind some of the story about the arrival of the non-Jewish wise ones from the distant pagan East.
The quotation from Isaiah contains several elements that influenced the early Christians’ description of the baptism of Jesus which is celebrated today, the Feast of the Epiphany.
This week’s collect:
Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.