Tuesday January 17 Epiphany 2
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Psalm 26
“I do not sit down with the wicked”: this gives us words to say how we wish to live, that deep in our heart we really are such people as keep God’s commands to love and do justice. “My foot stands on level ground” because we ground our lives on the solid base of justice.
Psalm 28
Like many psalms, this asks that the wicked be punished: “give them their just deserts.” (“Deserts” is “What is deserved,” not miles of sand or misspelled sweets!) This desire for evil people to be destroyed seems very unlike Jesus’ request that we forgive our enemies and love them, but it is really giving us words to express our own intense desire that oppressive and violent policies should come to an end. We might pray, “May any international trade agreements that make the poor even poorer, be utterly done away with.” The violent images in many psalms are not to ask God to be violent, but to ask that all evil actions and policies be completely defeated so people around the world can live in peace and fulfilment. The second half of the psalm gives thanks that God has indeed been victorious over oppression.
Isaiah 44: 9-20 What’s Isaiah about?
This is a relentless attack by Isaiah on the uselessness of idols that people carve and worship in order to change history. But lifeless idols can do nothing. Notice the detailed description of the complex technology involved—the creation of constructed idols was a sophisticated art and would have impressed the Israelites suddenly encountering these technologies for the first time in Babylon. And some of the Israelites would have been so impressed that they transferred their loyalty to the religion that produced such sophisticated images. (Is that what happened when Christianity converted people around the world?) But despite the technological sophistication involved in the creation of idols, Isaiah is clear that enacting justice is the only one that can actually act to care for people and change history and return the people to their homes. That is to follow the only true God.
In our day there are all sorts of idols—society’s priorities—created using sophisticated technologies to which society gives loyalty and to which even Christians are attracted. But those priorities, no matter how sophisticated, are impotent to accomplish new life. That’s why there is so much death in the world. Only justice, that everyone is valued and is given dignity, which is the form of the real God, can change the future and bring us to our centre and our home and to real life.
Mark 3: 19b-35 What’s Mark about?
Criticism of Jesus increases because his priorities are so out of sync with his society’s. His family thinks he is mentally ill, and the religious leaders accuse him of being the incarnation of evil. Jesus responds to the accusation that he can cast out evil only because he is a stronger evil, by pointing out the inconsistency—how can it be evil to heal people? If that is what evil is doing, more power to it—then evil has destroyed itself! We can almost hear his laughter at the preposterous criticism that by doing good he proves himself to be evil!
He goes on to say that to deliberately reject something you know is good and to call it evil—that is the unforgivable sin, unforgivable because to do so is to destroy one’s own deepest truth and then there’s no possibility of understanding that one has offended and needs forgiveness.
Returning to his family’s criticism that he is mentally ill, Jesus says that all who are connected to God’s justice are his family—so if he is mentally ill, then all his followers must also be mentally ill! He is turning all our assumptions about what makes sense, upside down, and right side up.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
is the light of the world.
May your people,
illumined by your word and sacraments,
shine with the radiance of his glory,
that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed
to the ends of the earth;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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