Saturday March 20 Lent 4
Click here for simplified daily office prayers
Psalm 107 Part 2
When the Israelites completed their journey through the wilderness God brought disaster on the evil people who lived there (as the Israelites understood it) to make a fertile place for God’s own people. When God’s people were oppressed, God rescued them. Wise people, the poem says, will take this to heart and will trust in God’s care and justice to prevail.
One of our tasks today is to cultivate that trust in God’s care for humanity so that when disaster happens in our world we will have something solid to offer.
Psalm 108
I will praise God because God is so powerful and I ask you, God, to act on behalf of the poor. God replies by listing all ways in which land will be given to God’s people and taken from those who are evil. I respond by asking God to act to save us because it seems God has abandoned us.
These two psalms are scheduled for Saturdays as we experience the wait for the resurrection while Christ is still in the grave.
Jeremiah 23: 9-15
Jeremiah is devastated because the political and religious leaders have encouraged the people to abandon justice. The people of Samaria (the capital in the north) have followed other gods, but the people of Jerusalem (the capital in the south) have done even worse. The accusation of adultery is not about personal adultery, but about a nation committing adultery with greed as if they had taken greed as a lover, and so they are committing adultery against the God of justice. This abandoning of God’s justice has been led by both prophets and priests, and they will have bitter consequences.
Religion is still tempted to use its power to oppress people, and for leaders of a faith based on a God of love to exploit people remains a horrific offence.
John 6: 60-71
Jesus’ claim that we must eat and drink him—in other words that his life is to become our life—precipitates a decision now, as it did then. Do we want to go through death and into resurrection by caring that deeply? For most of us the answer is No, we don’t want to love that much. That’s why Judas and the betrayal of Jesus now appears for the first time in this gospel—Judas is us when we want to have nothing to do with Jesus’ calling to such deep caring. So is there no hope?
Peter responds that there is no real alternative to taking Jesus’ life into ourselves. Judas is the alternative: to reject full life, becoming centred on ourselves. But that’s the way of death.
So, Peter says, there’s no option. I may not want to practice sacrificial caring at all (and Peter does betray Jesus), but the only other option is to choose death, and so we choose Jesus, even with the implications.
Calling us to sacrificial love is crazy, but it’s the only solution for the future of the human race or the maturity of individuals, so taking Jesus’ life into ours is the only way forward that makes sense. That’s how people respond to Jesus—not because following him is satisfying or enjoyable, but that it’s better than any alternative. And then we end up fulfilled.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
through the waters of baptism
your Son has made us children of light.
May we ever walk in his light
and show forth your glory in the world;
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 a comment on the web site.