Wednesday February 26 Epiphany 7
Click here for simplified daily office prayers
Psalm 119 Part 7
Psalm 119 is a meditation on responding to God’s call to justice. Each of the 176 verses is a variation on the theme of what it means to follow God’s call to justice, using terms such as “command”,”law”, “word”, “statute”, and the like. The psalm is arranged in 22 groups of eight verses—one group for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Within a group, each of the eight verses starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the groups are in Hebrew alphabetical order. So the first group of eight verses all start with A, the second group all start with B and so on. The first seven verses mirror the seven days of creation, with the eighth sometimes pointing to the next group. This very careful construction mirrors God’s creating the universe by overcoming chaos with order.
In the human world, justice, dignity and fulfilment – the outcomes of justice—are the human expressions of order. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. Today’s three sections begin with the letters Q, R, S, and T, the final letters of the Hebrew alphabet. As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with “Q” and so on.
Ruth 2: 1-13 What’s Ruth about?
Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s husband, generously welcomes Ruth, the unclean pagan foreigner, and protects her from unwelcome advances by his servants, and ensures that she can gather left-over grain at the harvest for free. Such an attitude would encourage Jews exiled in Babylon to imagine that unclean pagans could be acceptable to God.
Matthew 5: 21-26 What’s Matthew about?
Matthew is particularly concerned with how the early Christians are treating one another. He remembers Jesus as having said that relationships within the Christian community (which is what the repeated references to “brother or sister” means) are to be of the highest integrity—far more than just obedience to the ten commandments. If the Christian community doesn’t have deeper relationships than the rest of society, we don’t have anything to contribute. That’s the point of Jesus’ sermon on the Mount—Jesus is calling us to a deeper morality than Moses did through the ten commandments.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
your Son revealed in signs and miracles
the wonder of your saving love.
Renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weakness
sustain us by your mighty power;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.