Friday • 10/1/2021
Friday of the Eighteenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 21)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 102; 2 Kings 19:1–20; 1 Corinthians 9:16–27; Matthew 8:1–17

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)

I love three things especially about the story of Hezekiah and Isaiah in 2 Kings.

That the king consults the prophet. “When the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah…” — 2 Kings 19:5.” Here’s a wonderful picture of interdependence within the Kingdom of God. You complement me, and I complement you. One of us may be more of a doer, and the other more a pray-er. One a leader, the other a petitioner. One a person of action, the other a person of contemplation. We need one another in the Body of Christ.  

That the king lays Sennecharib’s letter before the Lord. “Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it; then Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord” — 2 Kings 19:14. I appreciate the physicality of the act of spreading that haughty letter out before the Lord, and crying out, “Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God” (2 Kings 19:16).

I’m sure that the words alone would have sufficed, and that Hezekiah could have prayed from his palace. But he goes to the temple, the place where God says he meets with his people in a particular way. And Hezekiah adds the visual and tactile dimension to the words. To paraphrase: “See, here are the very words the pagan king has sent to mock you! He’s talking about destroying this very place where you and I are meeting. You can’t let him get away with that!” The connection between Hezekiah and Yahweh is so very visceral, existential, and real. 

Scripture records this encounter because we need to see it. Likewise, we need the physicality and the earthiness of the liturgy—all its sensory aids, all its motions and all its “stuff” (sacraments and sacramentals). Without them, faith can just be mere make-believe mind games. 

That God works through contingencies beyond our ability to imagine them. Who would have thought that the deliverance of Judah and Jerusalem would come by internal conflict and division within the enemy army?  

And then, looking briefly at today’s gospel: In Scripture, Israel’s mission in the world, as a “kingdom of priests,” was to do something like what Hezekiah did. That is: to take the brokenness of the human situation and lay it before the Lord, crying out over the millennia, “How long, O God, will the adversary scoff? Will the enemy blaspheme your Name forever?” (Psalm 74:9). And year after year, offering up a sin offering—all this, from a New Covenant perspective, in anticipation of a final doing away with sin and of the restoration of fellowship forever.  

Who would have thought that God’s means of responding to that cry would have been to send his Son in the likeness of our flesh, to overcome sin and all its effects right here in the weakness of our flesh, to “take our infirmities and bear our diseases”? That is what the prophet Isaiah, to whom Hezekiah went, foresaw happening. That is what Matthew depicts in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus heals a leper, a paralytic, demon-possessed person, and all kinds of sick people. Each healing is a foretaste of his conquest of sin on the cross and his banishment of death at his resurrection. Each is a demonstration of what Isaiah had prophesied: “This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases’” (Matthew 8:17, quoting Isaiah 53:4). Praise be!

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons