Friday • 1/19/2024 •
Friday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Genesis 11:27–12:8; Hebrews 7:1–17; John 4:16–26
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we bring to our lives that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Friday in the Second Week of the Season After Epiphany. We are in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
Weeks before the end of her nearly 100 years of life, TV’s Golden Girls (and the Super Bowl’s Snickers Bar commercial) actress Betty White told people.com that her famously upbeat nature came from being born “a cockeyed optimist.”
Genesis 12: “cockeyed optimism.” The Bible as a whole is characterized by “cockeyed optimism,” and that is true of the book of Genesis in a special way.
Biblical scholar Gerhard Von Rad says it well:
The story about the Tower of Babel concludes with God’s judgment on mankind; there is no word of grace. The whole primeval history, therefore, seems to break off in shrill dissonance…: Is God’s relationship to the nations now finally broken; is God’s gracious forbearance now exhausted; has God rejected the nations in wrath forever? That is the burdensome question which no thoughtful reader of ch. 11 can avoid…. Only then is the reader properly prepared to take up the strangely new thing that now follows the comfortless story about the building of the tower: the election and blessing of Abraham. We stand here, therefore, at the point where primeval history and sacred history dovetail, and thus at one of the most important places in the entire Old Testament. *
It is “cockeyed optimism” that dares to hold out hope that despite the bleakness of the situation we are left with at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel, nonetheless “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3b). What makes the hope seem especially “cockeyed” is that this universal hope comes through one particular man and his posterity: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’” (Genesis 12:1). As only the Bible could image things, the reversal of the universal revolt against God’s rule begins with one man, without a word, doing what God says to do: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…” (Genesis 12:4).
Image: Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Hebrews 7: Melchizedek’s “Easter egg.” Furthering the “cockeyed optimism” of the Bible, the writer to the Hebrews delivers one of the most delightful “Easter eggs” in the entire Bible. He recalls a moment in Abraham’s life when the patriarch points dramatically to the coming of Christ. Abraham has himself just played the role of deliverer, rescuing his nephew Lot in a great military victory over “the five kings.” Returning home from his victory, Abraham meets a mysterious priest and king named Melchizedek, who, according to the writer to the Hebrews, prefigures Christ. His name means “King of Righteousness” and he is king of a city named Salem, which means “Peace” (the future Jerusalem, “City of Peace”). So he is “King of Righteousness” and “King of Peace.” But he is also a priest of the “Most High God” (Hebrews 7:1).
Because no father or mother or genealogy or birth date or death date is recorded of him, Melchizedek prefigures Christ’s eternality (Hebrews 7:3). Because he receives a tithe from Abraham, he represents a priesthood that is superior to the Levitical priesthood that will descend from Abraham (Hebrews 7:4–9). And because he is a Gentile, he stands as a testimony that the children of Abraham’s mission are also recipients of God’s kind intentions for the whole world. Jesus’s own priesthood is emphatically patterned after Melchizedek’s—or in the “cockeyed” logic of typology (Old Testament shadow-prefigurements of New Testament realities), perhaps it’s better to say that Melchizedek’s is patterned after Christ’s!
John 4: God’s “cockeyed” grace. The true and living God whom the non-Jew Melchizedek serves as the “Most High God” will reveal himself to Moses as the great “I AM” in the burning bush of Exodus 3. In John 4, the great “I AM” makes the most explicit of his self-revelations: “The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I AM, the one who is speaking to you’” (John 4:25–26). Jesus makes this astounding revelation to this “fallen” woman of the Samaritan well, she whose illicit liaisons force her to come for water in the middle of the day. Here is God’s “cockeyed” grace—“grace upon grace” (John 1:16).
Moreover, Jesus, as the great “I AM,” has come not just to bring reconciliation to the likes of this lost woman, he has come to heal the breaches in the fractured human race. Jews and Samaritans looked at one another across a No Man’s Land of religious loathing and disdain. But Jesus has come to heal tribal antipathies and reconcile brothers lost to each other in religious warfare: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24).
The words are not empty, nor are they naïve optimism. The Father’s “seeking” leads Jesus, as Athanasius puts it, to “stretch out his hands, that with the one he might draw the ancient people and with the other those from the Gentiles, and join both together in himself” (On the Incarnation 25). The results are as sure as Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, and they begin to take effect when apostles from Jerusalem return to Samaria to witness the Spirit of Pentecost baptizing people there just as it had in Jerusalem (Acts 8:14–17).
May you and I live with cockeyed wonder and delighted optimism at the saving power of God in Christ.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
* Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev., The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), p. 153.