Thursday July 25 Pentecost 9
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Psalm 50
This psalm imagines God’s response to the people carrying out their religious practices but doing evil and abandoning justice. Rather than simply reacting or punishing, God lays out the case as if God were taking them to court—the idea is that God is being completely fair and getting an unbiased opinion about what the people have done. They have refused to be thankful for what God has done for them in rescuing them from Egypt and have substituted religion for being just to their own poor people and if this continues there will be consequences, but if they return to justice and thanksgiving all will be well.
Psalm 98
The people, the nations, and the whole of creation delight in God’s victory and rejoice when God comes to put all creation right. This psalm is used at Easter, and is often used on Sundays, mini-anniversaries of Easter. There is some lovely imagery of the sea deliberately making a noise with its waves and rivers doing the same by clapping their hands.
Joshua 9.3-21 What’s Joshua about?
A group of the local people from the nearby Canaanite city of Gibeon trick the Israelites into making a treaty with them, by pretending to be from a distant country. Joshua insists on keeping the treaty when he discovers the trick, thus placing loyalty to their oath to God for the benefit of lying foreigners above their own self-interest. Such integrity is still rare in our time, but it became the Israelites’ central understanding of God’s nature. However, there are consequences for the trick—the Gibeonites are allowed to live in the land but must serve the Israelites like slaves.
The purpose of the story is to emphasize the necessity of keeping relationship with God even when it is to one’s own disadvantage, but that God finds a way to compensate us when we do.
Matthew 26.69-75 What’s Matthew about?
Despite his earlier protestations of loyalty to Jesus, when in danger Peter repeatedly denies knowing Jesus. It is remarkable how this story, which puts Peter in such a bad light, was remembered and widely circulated during Peter’s subsequent leadership of the Christian community in Jerusalem. It demonstrates how profoundly the early leaders experienced freedom from their guilt and failure otherwise such stories would never have been repeatedly told and ultimately written down. Something about the resurrection set the early leaders completely free from their betrayal of Jesus.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son has opened for us
a new and living way into your presence.
Give us pure hearts and constant wills
to worship you in spirit and in truth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.