Friday June 21 Pentecost 4
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Psalm 91
Those who shelter under God like a chick beneath its mother’s wings will be safe from all danger and will see how disaster befalls those who put their trust in evil. In the final three verses God is speaking: we are safe because God has decided to be bound to us in love.
The verse about not hurting one’s foot on a stone was applied by the early Christians to Jesus’ temptation in the desert to throw himself off the top of the temple without being hurt.
Psalm 92
Those who trust in God will be upheld and will flourish like trees with lots of water. Evil will be utterly destroyed. The God who does this is as solid as a rock.
Numbers 13.1-3, 21-30 What’s Numbers about?
Moses and the people have arrived at the edge of the land God had promised and he sends scouts to explore it. They find the promised land to be fertile but already occupied. They are afraid to enter the land, because they do not trust God to care for them.
As we will see in the next couple of readings this lack of trust delays their entry into the land by an entire generation. For those enslaved in Babylon a thousand years later when this book was compiled, this story would have provided an explanation for why the return to Jerusalem was taking so long and why an entire generation had passed away in exile before they returned — it was because the people weren’t trusting God to be in charge of history, just as had happened a thousand years earlier as described in this ancient story. Trusting that God is still in charge of history is a challenge for people of faith in our day.
Matthew 18.21-35 What’s Matthew about?
Peter understands Jesus’ call to extraordinary levels of inclusion and commits himself to forgive someone who has offended him seven times in a row. Jesus replies that that is a trifle—Peter should have committed to forgive ten times as much.
Jesus is challenging Peter and us to grasp the enormity of God’s love for us and what that implies about our acceptance of others in the Christian community. This is one of Matthew’s chief themes, that a new level of profound care is to characterize the Christian community. But, Matthew warns, if we don’t act in that way, then we are doomed.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God, without you we are not able to please you.
Mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit
may in all things direct and rule our hearts;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.