Wednesday • 10/20/2022
Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 38; Lamentations 2:8–15; 1 Corinthians 15:51–58; Matthew 12:1–14

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

Lamentations: God’s people have hit bottom. “Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?” asks Jeremiah in his utter grief (Lamentations 2:14). Jeremiah personifies Jerusalem as an adulterous wife who has been exposed and cast aside both by her husband and her paramour. Now, she who was called “the perfection of beauty” is mocked by the nations as perfect only in ruined desolation. She had been called “the joy of all the earth” by virtue of the law that governed her, the wisdom that flowed from her, and the worship that adorned her. Now, it’s all gone. Jerusalem’s kings and princes are in exile. The temple has been leveled, and sacrifice and worship have been cut off. Prophets still speak falsehood, because they refuse to name the sinful idolatry that has been the people’s downfall. And in the streets, mothers offer what comfort they can to the babies starving in their arms.

For some 70 years or so, Jerusalem and her people will languish thus, while, as Moses and the prophets had forecast, the land will enjoy its sabbath rest from idolatry and lovelessness (Leviticus 26:34; Jeremiah 25:11–12; 29:10–14; 2 Chronicles 36:21).

As deep as the wound is, however, there is healing. Tomorrow, our Old Testament readings turn the corner with the Persian King Cyrus’s decree calling for the return of Jews to their homeland and for the rebuilding of Yahweh’s house in Jerusalem.

Although our wounds, like Jerusalem’s, may feel “as deep as the sea,” there is always an affirmative answer to the question, “Who can heal you?” Yes, our Lord can and does.

Matthew: Jesus is our rest. Yahweh had provided a sabbath framework to shape Israel’s life. Weeks, months, years, and cycles of years were designed to mirror God’s original creative acts (Genesis 1), and to afford humans regular relief and refreshment of body and soul. The expansion of the sabbath principle in the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25) and in Daniel’s prophecies of a great Jubilee at the end of seven cycles of seven years (Daniel 7,9)—these expansions gave promise of a whole new era of sabbath rest that would be inaugurated by the Son of Man when he comes to put an end to sacrifice and establish God’s Kingdom.

For Matthew, that era has come because the Lord of the Sabbath has come. He has come to take away the sin of his people. And on the way, Jesus imperiously oversteps contemporary extra sabbath requirements that had made the weekly sabbath onerous and burdensome rather than joyful and restorative. And he does so to make the point that he is himself the joy and the restoration which the sabbath had long promised..

Today’s account of the disciples gleaning in the fields on the sabbath illustrates yesterday’s saying from Jesus: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

1 Corinthians: the trumpet shall sound. It is helpful, I believe, to think of Jesus as our Sabbath now-and-not-yet. Now, in the present, he delivers us from self-justification and from sin’s dominion, by virtue of his cross, resurrection, and indwelling Spirit. At the end of history as we know it, he will draw us from the grave, and deliver us (along with all creation) from death’s cruel grip.

The sounding of “the last trumpet” in today’s paragraph in 1 Corinthians is the sounding of one final Jubilee shophar (Leviticus 25:8–13), the signaling of our freedom at last from slavery to the corruption of death.

Every time I come upon it, this passage evokes a welcome and redemptive earworm: the “The Trumpet Shall Sound” from Handel’s Messiah (rendered here by Dashon Burton and Music in the Somerset Hills). It’s an earworm that sustained me throughout my parents’ long descent into dementia, an earworm with promise of what lies on the far side of the withering of their bodies and minds. “The trumpet shall sound….” It’s an earworm that sounds in my head at every funeral I oversee. “The trumpet shall sound….” It’s an earworm that helps me walk the halls of nursing homes with their strange juxtaposition of frail residents lying alone in rooms outside of which have been lovingly hung box frame collections of pictures of those same residents in their vibrant younger days. “The trumpet shall sound … and we shall be raised incorruptible.”

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Stained Glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida