Friday August 23 Pentecost 13
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Psalm 140
A cry to God for help against enemies who are strong and trust that God will help the poor and needy.
Psalm 142
A cry to God to help when there is no hope. If God acts to save me, I will then be able to praise God again.
These two psalms are appropriate for Fridays, a mini-anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion.
Job 2.1-13 What’s Job about?
When the divine beings are again in council with God, God claims vindication—Job has remained faithful despite his successes having become disasters. But the Satan challenges God, proposing that if Job’s life is threatened he will become faithless. God trusts Job’s faithfulness and so gives permission for the experiment to proceed.
Job finds his life in danger from an incurable disease and sits in a garbage dump scraping his skin. His wife insists the old way of understanding God was right—he must have done something terrible. Job’s three friends arrive to support him and are appalled and deeply caring. Job stills blesses God and accepts his fate. But after a week of the friends sitting in silence with him, tomorrow we will read how Job will no longer patiently accept his disaster.
John 6.27-40 What’s John about?
Crowds have tracked Jesus down following his feeding of five thousand people. As often in John’s gospel, Jesus uses an event to start a conversation about its deeper meaning. Jesus asks that people understand that for one’s life to be deeply fed is more than eating physical food—we must be fed by Jesus in the same way that the Israelites were fed with manna—he is the real bread. He means that his life of self-offering love is the only way to be truly alive and we can only do that by taking his life into ours—that’s how he feeds us with himself.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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