Wednesday • 11/1/2023 •
Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week After Pentecost (Proper 25)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49-72; Ezra 6:1-22; Revelation 5:1-10; Matthew 13:10-17
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)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives 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 Wednesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 25 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Three intriguing moments in the Bible’s storyline.
Ezra: Persian aid. In today’s reading, a succession of Persian rulers realize that they have a vested interest in what happens in Jerusalem’s temple. Darius not only confirms Cyrus’s original decree that God’s house in Jerusalem be built. He underwrites the entire project: “…so that they may offer pleasing sacrifices to the God of heaven, and pray for the life of the king and his children” (Ezra 6:10). It’s as though these strangers to the promises of God (see Ephesians 2:12) have overheard whisperings from above. We know, because we know the larger story, that Yahweh had called Israel “to be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5b–6a). At some level, the Persian kings have taken hold of this deep mystery.
The entire nation of Israel is a priesthood. Priests represent not just themselves. They dare to enter God’s presence, and they do so on behalf of others. Israel’s ministry before the Lord is for the sake of the whole world. Israel’s mission is indeed to offer sacrifices—and ultimately, it turns out, a singular sacrifice—for the whole world, for the life of kings and children not just in Persia in the 5th century BC, but for kings and paupers, elderly and children, of every tribe and tongue, of every time and place.
Revelation 5: The Lion and the Lamb. And in this precise mystery lies the key to the entire book of Revelation—a mystery that Revelation 5 unlocks. The scroll that tells the destiny of all humanity must be opened. Who is worthy to tell the story of all of us? Judah’s conquering Lion, of course, per the promise made to King David and his line, except with an ironic twist. The Lion conquers by giving himself up as a sacrificial victim: “Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered” (Revelation 5:6).
Image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
No one in the modern world has told this tale as memorably as C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The White Witch has imprisoned the fantasy realm of Narnia under a spell of a perpetual winter. She appeals to the justice of a deep magic that demands the death of Edmund, a traitorous child visiting from our world. Aslan, the great Lion of Narnia, negotiates the release of Edmund, at the price of his own slaughter on the altar-like Stone Table. By a deeper and older magic, Aslan’s death destroys the Stone Table, and more. Aslan returns to life, the witch’s magic begins to crumble, and winter starts working backwards.
The redeemer of our world is Judah’s Lion slain as a Sacrificial Lamb, risen as Christus Victor—Victor over sin, over death, over hell, over everything that could possibly separate us from God. He is worthy to open the scroll. He is worthy to tell the world its true story. He is worthy to reveal to each of us our destiny as beloved children of the great King. What’s more, he makes us—we who come “from every tribe and language and people and nation”—what he has called his people to be, “a kingdom and priests serving our God, and …reign[ing] on earth” (Revelation 5:9,10). Praise be!
Matthew: Parables and the demand to choose. A note of sadness courses through Jesus’s earthly ministry, and not just sadness because of the necessity of the death he must die in sinners’ place. A deeper sadness, it seems. A grief over the dullness of his contemporaries who fail to grasp who he is as fulfillment of the divine drama that is being played out before them. He has come to end the ongoing exile of Israel (and of the whole world!) in the Babylon of sin and death and hell. The magi from the same region as Ezra’s Persian kings foresaw it at the beginning of Matthew’s narrative (Matthew 2). And Matthew’s account will end with Jesus receiving “all authority in heaven and on earth,” so he can commission his followers to extend his rule to all the nations of the earth (Matthew 28).
In the unseeing eyes and unhearing ears Jesus encounters, he recognizes the same thing Isaiah had seen and heard when he warned of the coming of the Babylonian Captivity. Isaiah’s call to get right with God had gone largely unheeded. And so it is in Jesus’s day: “With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive’” (Matthew 13:14, quoting Isaiah 6:9). People are cutting themselves off from the promises of God, shutting themselves out of the Kingdom of heaven, and consigning themselves to the ongoing hell of separation from God and his good purposes. And it grieves Jesus.
The function of the parables is to present the challenge to faith. There is no syllogistic path to truth in them. There is, rather, a word picture that we can write ourselves into, or not. In the context of the parables of Matthew 13, I see myself as “good soil” who hears, understands, and bears fruit—or not. I see myself as wheat, or tare; as going for the treasure, or ignoring it; as prizing the pearl of great price, or taking a pass on it; as good fish, or as bycatch. Jesus’s message in the parables: Choose wisely. May it be so for you and for me!
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+