Saturday December 28 Christmas
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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.
Isaiah 26: 1-9 What’s Isaiah about?
Isaiah speaks with confidence that God will ensure a safe return to Jerusalem for those who follow the way of justice and care for the poor, and will ensure that those who were oppressors will have no place to live.
Matthew 2: 13-18 What’s Matthew about?
Luke had seen Jesus’ significance in repeating the events of Samuel’s birth, but Matthew interprets Jesus as a repetition of Moses’ birth. To escape Herod’s murderous rage Joseph takes Jesus to Egypt thus setting the scene so that Jesus can return from Egypt to the land God promised, just as Moses did when he led the people from Egypt to the promised land.
This horrific act of genocide is consistent with what is known about the character of Herod, and would have taken place shortly after Jesus’ birth, so that today is the rough anniversary of that horror. Matthew is making it clear that God’s act of love is rejected by his attempted murder at birth and that his murder will be successfully accomplished under Herod’s successor when Jesus is in his early thirties.
Can Jesus be for us the route of escape from our slavery to the assumptions that oppression and national violence are inevitable, into the promised land where the world is the way God intended?
This week’s collect:
O God our Father,
whose Word has come among us
in the Holy Child of Bethlehem,
may the light of faith
illumine our hearts
and shine in our words and deeds;
through him who is Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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