Friday October 8 Pentecost 19
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Psalm 140
A cry to God for help against enemies who are strong and trust that God will help the poor and needy.
Psalm 142
A cry to God to help when there is no hope. If God acts to save me, I will then be able to praise God again.
2 Kings 23: 36—24: 17 What’s Kings about?
The next two kings are evil and abandon the just ways of God. The disaster is now inescapable. We have come to the point which the writers of the books of Kings have been making—that the catastrophe of the temple being destroyed and the people being taken into slavery was caused by the ever-increasing evil of Israel’s kings. Babylon conquers the land. The annihilation of the temple and its ritual contents—the original stone Ten Commandments which described how a just society operates, the jar of manna from the wilderness with which God fed the people in the wilderness, and the place where God met the people in animal sacrifice—was a catastrophic disaster beyond comprehension. It called into question whether there really was a God of justice.
This catastrophic event challenged the leaders to understand what was going on. God had seen fit to dwell in the temple in Jerusalem. So had God finally abandoned them? The explanation that they came up with, and which changed the nature of Judaism and subsequent history, was that even the God of infinite justice and care for the poor couldn’t reverse the consequences of their own greed and oppression of the poor. The writers interpret what we might call a normal military defeat by a super-power over a small nation, as the inevitable consequence of their own injustice. Writing seventy years after the disaster, when King Cyrus had conquered Babylon and released the Jews, these leaders and thinkers interpreted that release to have been a deliberate act of forgiveness by God.
Their creativity in finding ways to see God beneath the international events of their time challenges us to imagine God’s hand behind the international events in our day. How well are we doing that?
Matthew 9: 27-34 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus heals two blind men, and says explicitly that their trust in him is central. Matthew is encouraging his community, under pressure decades later, not to lose faith in Jesus. He then heals a man possessed by a double demon of insanity and inability to speak. Again, Matthew may be responding to the criticisms the early Christians were undergoing of being mad to remain faithful to a crucified saviour and being unable to explain to others why. People are astonished at Jesus, and the criticism is growing—if Jesus throws out demons he must be a demon himself!
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have built your Church
on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.
Join us together in unity of spirit by their teaching,
that we may become a holy temple, acceptable to you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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