Thursday November 11 Pentecost 24
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Psalm 85
Trust that God will save us, despite what we have done, and will fill us with plenty and fill the land with justice.
Psalm 86
O God, you have been so generous to me, I trust you, and ask you to uphold me when I am attacked.
1 Maccabees 1: 1-28 What’s Maccabees about?
Books such as Maccabees (named for two brothers who organized a revolt against Greek rule and were executed by the Greeks) weren’t considered central scripture but illustrate faithful lives dedicated to God. Fifteen such books, including the two books of the Maccabees, are collected in a section of many Bibles called “The Apocrypha”.
The book opens by describing how, two hundred years before Jesus, Alexander the Great had made Greece a world power and one of his successors, Antiochus, has expanded the Greek empire, has stripped the temple of its sacred vessels and is imposing Greek religion and culture on the Jews. Under this immense cultural pressure many Jewish people have decided to join Greek culture and abandon their distinctive faith. This sets the scene for the two Maccabee brothers to initiate their revolt which the rest of the book describes.
Matthew 16: 1-12 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus is challenged by the religious leaders who refuse to see the real meaning of his miracles—that the kingdom is coming. They ask for proof in the form of a demonstration miracle, but Jesus replies that the only miracle that matters is that like Jonah who symbolically died in the great whale and was rescued—the only miracle that matters, Jesus means, is that he will die and rise. The desire to seek power, in the form of a demonstration miracle and their refusal to see God’s inclusive love breaking into the world through death is something that the disciples must be wary of doing themselves—”beware the yeast of the pharisees.”
Perhaps this is an admonition directed to us to be aware that we live in a world where power to control others, and not self-sacrificing love, is the dominant loyalty. But Jesus leads us in a different, and profoundly life-giving direction from that which the world trusts.
This week’s collect:
Eternal God,
who caused all holy scriptures
to be written for our learning,
grant us so to hear them,
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,
that we may embrace and ever hold fast
the blessed hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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