Sunday November 7 Pentecost 24
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Psalm 34
I will praise God because God rescued me when I was in trouble. God will always support those who live with integrity and the evil people will not get away with it forever.
The verse about no bones being broken was interpreted by John in writing his gospel to mean that none of Jesus’ bones were broken as was the normal Roman practice when death by crucifixion was to be hastened. In Jesus’ case, John explains, his legs were not broken because he had already died.
Ezra 10: 1-17 What’s Ezra about?
Ezra calls a meeting of the whole country to promise not to marry foreign women, and so to stay pure. Leaders are appointed to examine all the families. This all seems strange to us, today, but was their way of trying to be faithful to their God of justice.
Luke 14: 12-24 What’s Luke about?
Luke now tells a series of stories about banquets—in the ancient world giving a banquet was the way you acquired status and advertised your wealth. Jesus turns this expectation upside down—what if banquets became a celebration of caring for people without status and you didn’t get any status yourself? A guest affirms that that would be heaven, implicitly criticizing the host.
Jesus then tells a story, possibly based on an actual incident, in which someone desperate to impress their wealthy neighbours and to increase their fame, throws such a banquet. The neighbours however are tired of his desperate desire to impress and collude together to refuse to attend, sending deliberately flimsy excuses at the last minute when the food is prepared and will now rot. But here’s how the kingdom breaks in anyway, Jesus says: even this self-centred social climber unknowingly enacts God’s kingdom of love. In his rage at having been shamed he tries to embarrass his neighbours by throwing an elaborate banquet for street people! Jesus challenges his host and the clever guest to really care about the true purpose of banquets—to enact the kingdom of radical inclusion for even the poorest people.
Is Jesus challenging our society to do the same?
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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