Saturday June 22 Pentecost 4
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Psalm 136
God’s relentless love (‘mercy’ in the relentless refrain of this hymn) is seen first in creation, then in Israel’s rescue from Egypt as if that rescue was another part of creation, and finally for every creature.
Numbers 13.31-14.25 What’s Numbers about?
The people are frightened of the inhabitants of the land God wishes to give to them. They do not trust that God will honour the covenant to give them the land and so they decide to return to Egypt. In response, God intends to destroy them, but Moses argues with God that God would then look foolish to the Egyptians, so God forgives. Even so, God cannot remove all the consequences of their lack of trust and that generation never arrives in the land God promised.
These stories were compiled when the people were being released from Babylon a thousand years after their escape from Egypt, and it may be that the seventy years they were enslaved in Babylon is being explained as a pattern: a thousand years ago we didn’t trust God, so an entire generation died before our people finally arrived in the land God promised, and that’s why we were seventy years in Babylon—it’s not that God didn’t care or wasn’t powerful enough but that we didn’t trust.
If we don’t trust God’s infinite power and goodness, we put our trust in unreliable things such as the threat of large-scale violence to keep us safe or the exploitation of the poorest to keep our prices down, the consequences will be self-destruction which can feel like God being angry but are actually our responsibility.
Matthew 19.1-12 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus challenges the assumption that men may arbitrarily divorce a wife for no reason, thus leaving her destitute in absolute poverty. The religious leaders respond that the Bible gives husbands permission to do that. The disciples respond that such a standard of respect for women is impossible, and it would be better not to get married.
Jesus points out that among the various reasons a man might be castrated, some choose to be castrated (because that made it possible for a man to serve in a palace in a position of great trust, honour and wealth), so, Jesus points out, men do have a choice about their own sexuality and are able to treat women with equality and not as objects to be owned or disowned.
Perhaps this story reflects an attempt within the Christian community to treat Christian women as of less value than men. Jesus’ valuing of women as equals was a profoundly new understanding of the value of every person, and Matthew is determined that the Christian community not abandon that emergence of God’s kingdom.
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.