Friday • 1/15/2021
Week of 1 Epiphany
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 16; Psalm 17; Isaiah 42:(1–9)10–17; Ephesians 3:1–13; Mark 2:13–22
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)
Isaiah: “Sing a new song.”
Isaiah invites God’s people to take up a “new song,” celebrating the fact that, like a mighty warrior, Yahweh has taken up their cause against their enemies: “The Lord goes forth like a soldier, like a warrior he stirs up his fury” (Isaiah 42:13a).
Whenever we find a call for a “new song” in Scripture, we are taken back to the song that Israel first sang after crossing the Red Sea. It’s the first big celebratory song in the Bible. Delivered from slavery in Egypt and witness to the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, Israel danced and sang. They rejoiced: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. … The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name” (Exodus 15:1,3). Subsequently, whenever in Israel’s history Yahweh performs an act that’s a reminder of an exodus-like liberation, Israel sings a “new song” to celebrate that new chapter in her story of rescue and deliverance. Yahweh is her champion, and she rejoices afresh in his mighty love.
For his part, Yahweh is passionate about restoring the well-being of his people, says Isaiah. He’s been forbearing long enough. Now he will act: “The Lord will march out like a champion, like a warrior he will stir up his zeal; with a shout he will raise the battle cry and will triumph over his enemies. ‘For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant’” (Isaiah 42:13–14 NIV). Yahweh’s time has come, and he is bringing forth a world-changing deliverance:
I will lay waste the mountains and hills
and dry up all their vegetation;
I will turn rivers into islands
and dry up the pools.
I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,
along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;
I will turn the darkness into light before them
and make the rough places smooth (Isaiah 42:15-16 NIV).
He is our champion too, as passionate for our well-being in the present as he was for Israel’s in the past. We can be confident of this: whatever our circumstances might be, he has allied himself with us and he fights for us. He cares.
Mark: It’s the sick who need a physician.
Theologians as far back as Irenaeus in the 2nd century have speculated that even if Adam and Eve had not fallen into sin in the Garden, the Second Person of the Trinity might still have become incarnate to confirm us in our righteousness and shalom, and to take us into the fully righteous, glorified state of perfected shalom that God had intended for us.
Well … it didn’t work that way. We fell. And so, Jesus didn’t come to make healthy people healthier, or righteous people more righteous. He came to make unrighteous people righteous, and to make sick people well. That’s why Mark makes a point of the fact that Jesus chooses a despised, compromised tax collector to be one of his twelve disciples. It’s why he makes a point of accepting this big sinner’s invitation to fellowship at table with “many tax collectors and sinners … for there were many who followed him” (Mark 2:15).
It is so, so, so gratifying to know that we don’t have to put on a show and pretend that we are “good.” It’s OK—not only OK, but actually necessary—to admit susceptibility to temptation; proclivity to serve self; disinterest in God himself; anger, greed, frustration, anxiety, and/or fear. People like that, not perfect people, that’s who he came for.
That’s who he is the Divine Warrior for. That’s who he cries out like a woman in labor for. That’s who he died for. That’s who he lives for.
Ephesians: God’s message to those who need a physician.
And that’s why the apostle Paul, one of the formerly “good” and “righteous” people, makes a point of calling himself “the very least among the saints” (Ephesians 3:8). Because he originally had lined up as one of those who “needed no physician,” he is all the more grateful that Jesus healed him of his arrogance, pride, and impiety. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence,” he explains to these same Ephesians in a subsequent letter (1 Timothy 1:13).
Now Paul can number himself among those who formerly were the spiritually “walking dead” but now are alive in Christ (Ephesians 2:1–10), and who were part of a broken human family that is being made whole again in Christ (Ephesians 2:11–22). He can boldly assert that the church—the remarkable collection of newly alive and newly reconciled people—is what God uses to prove his wisdom and to demonstrate his victory over death and disunity even in “the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). Pretty amazing stuff!
Be blessed this day in the knowledge that Jesus is your champion, and in the comfort of his healing mercy,
Reggie Kidd+