Tuesday • 10/24/2023 •
Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Lamentations 1:1–12; 1 Corinthians 15:41–50; Matthew 11:25–30
Reflections on Lamentations 1:1–12 here (Monday of Holy Week, 2020)
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); 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 draw insights from 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 Tuesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 24 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Today’s readings invite reflections on three things: Revulsion, Rest, and Resurrection
Lamentations: Revulsion. There is plenty of grief in Jeremiah’s life to merit the moniker, “the weeping prophet.” He’s been falsely accused of treason, sequestered in a cistern, threatened with death, and forcibly taken to Egypt. But what breaks his heart and compels him to write out a tear-drenched lamentation is seeing the beloved Holy City, the place God chose for the dwelling of his name, razed to the ground. The psalmist had sung, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King” (Psalm 48:1–2 KJV). But now, it’s reduced to rubble. And all Jeremiah can do is pour out his heart:
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
on the day of his fierce anger (Lamentations 1:12).
Just the other day, a friend sounded a similar note to me. Betrayed by a close companion and steamrolled by the complicity of enablers, my friend felt as violated and dishonored and despised and exposed as Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. All I knew to do was listen.
Matthew: Rest. The Bible’s story line, though, is that the fierceness of God’s anger is turned not so much on us as it is on all that keeps us from being “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” Some other god might look at our mess and say, “You gotta fix this yourself.” The God of the Bible comes himself and says, “I’ve got this. And I’ve got you.”
If rabbinic teaching held that Torah was the fullness of God’s revealed truth, Matthew offers Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” And Matthew’s Jesus says, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Jesus is God’s truth, in other words, come in person. If rabbinic teaching held that the Law was a yoke to take upon oneself to channel one’s energy and chasten one’s longings, Jesus says to take his yoke. His yoke, he insists, is easy and his burden light—largely, I think, because he promises to bear it with and alongside us. If rabbinic teaching says the Sabbath is when we rest, Jesus says he himself is our rest, 24/7. If other approaches to God and to life call us to prideful defensiveness and schemes for self-improvement, Jesus offers a hand of gentleness and meekness. I dearly pray there’s consolation for my decimated friend in Jesus’s offer.
1 Corinthians: Resurrection. Paul believes on behalf of the Corinthians what they dare not yet believe for themselves: that their mortal and corruptible bodies will one day give way to immortal and incorruptible bodies (1 Corinthians 15:53). Paul calls upon you and me—and my brokenhearted friend—to believe the same for ourselves.
And while there will be things about ourselves and our situations that will stubbornly resist our best efforts to fix them, one day all of it will give way to the irresistible force of God’s love. He will make all things right! The world will undergo its own purgation by fire (2 Peter 3:7,10). We will undergo our transformation from dishonor to glory, from weakness to power, and from the ephemerality of dust to the solidity of the image of the Man of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:43,48–49). I dearly pray there’s consolation here too for my friend, and for all of us.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+