Friday • 11/5/2021
Friday of the Twenty-third Week After Pentecost (Proper 26)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 69; Ezra 7:27-28, 8:21-36; Revelation 15:1–8; Matthew 14:13–21
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)
Heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston is supposed to have said, “A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be ‘good guys’ and there’s got to be ‘bad guys.’ And that’s what people pay for—to see the ‘bad guys’ get beat.”
There’s something primordial and true here. Even if movies and sporting events only give us constructs of “good” and “bad,” they can do so because they are answering to something deep within us. Part of what it is to bear the imago dei is to long for good to prevail and evil to be repulsed.
Revelation: joy in victory… That said, it can be challenging to get our heads around the dual fact that redemption of the earth has a bright side and a dark side. Heaven cannot hold back its joyful song celebrating the combining and the consummating of Old Covenant promise (“the song of Moses”) and of New Covenant promise (“the song of the Lamb”).
“And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. 3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb:
Great and amazing are your deeds,
Lord God the Almighty!
Just and true are your ways,
King of the nations!
4 Lord, who will not fear
and glorify your name?
For you alone are holy.
All nations will come
and worship before you,
for your judgments have been revealed” (Revelation 15:2–4).
…and joy in wrath. The concluding note of the exuberantly joyful song of Moses and of the Lamb is that “your judgments have been revealed.” God is setting right what had become twisted and broken. The obverse side of redemption is the consummation and completion of God’s wrath against the wickedness that has infected his creation: “Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and amazing: seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended … Then one of the four living creatures gave the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the wrath of God, who lives forever and ever; 8 and the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were ended” (Revelation 15:7–8).
God is not an “it.” We dare not emotionally neuter him or robotize him. Nor is he a mere Big Buddy in the sky, a patsy who winks at evil. The God of the Bible loathes the dissolution and corruption that have taken hold in his creation. Therefore, part of what it is to be redeemed is to share God’s own repugnance at all that is evil and unjust and godless—beginning, of course, with that which is evil and unjust and ungodly within ourselves. But then, all that has corrupted everything around us in the political realm, in economics, in church life, in international relations, in misuse of communications technology—in whatever destroys human lives or the creation over which he made us stewards. We dare not be emotionally neutral about any of that, because our God is not!
Part of what it is to share the heart of Jesus is to “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6). Part of doing so is hungering and thirsting for the day when God’s wrath does away with all that have defiled his creation. In addition, part of doing so is putting ourselves on the side of all that is right in the here and now, for, as Micah said,
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Medieval, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
