Tuesday • 2/28/2023 •
Week of 1 Lent 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Deuteronomy 9:4–12; Hebrews 3:1–11; John 2:13–22 

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 is Tuesday of the first week of Epiphany, as we prepare for Holy Week, and we are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.   

Looking back at Deuteronomy from the perspective of the letter to the Hebrews, it is profoundly sad to see the horrible decisions the Israelites who gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai are making. “They have been quick to turn from the way that I commanded them; they have cast an image for themselves,” Yahweh charges (Deuteronomy 9:12). Here are the people through whom God intends to bring order and grace back into a world that, at the beginning of the Bible’s story, had fallen into ruin and cruelty. Despite their own failings (see the litany in Deuteronomy 9:4–8), they have been called to be a “holy people,” a “treasured possession,” and “a consecrated people” (Deuteronomy 7:6; 26:18,19).  

But at the foot of Mount Sinai, they renounce their mission to become a home to Yahweh’s presence. They mock God’s call to establish a beachhead for the restoration of all the earth as God’s treasure, re-consecrated to his glory.  

In the words of the letter to the Hebrews, Moses had been placed among the people to help build themselves into a “house” for God (Hebrews 3:5), conforming their lives to the life of God as revealed in the Ten Words (the Ten Commandments). But with the creation of the golden calf (Deuteronomy 9), they basically said, “Nah! We’d rather welcome some other object of worship, as long as we get to fashion it for ourselves. It may be something less, but at least it won’t be you!” They’d chosen to continue the disorder and the cruelty. They’d chosen separation not just from their destiny, but from sanity and love. They won’t “reverse the curse.” 

And yet … even within the story line as it unfolds in Deuteronomy (to look ahead briefly at tomorrow’s verses from Deuteronomy), their mediator Moses will not let the people go to their own destruction. Moses cries out for mercy, and the mission moves forward. In his persistence as mediator, Moses anticipates Jesus who, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, comes as “apostle” of the Father’s mission of rescue, as “high priest” of the Father’s love, and as “faithful son over God’s house” (Hebrews 3:1,5).  

God’s amazing grace is revealed in this: Jesus is righteous where we are unrighteous, upright where we are dishonorable, incorrupt where we are corrupt. And by his death, resurrection, and ongoing ministry at the right hand of the Father, he offers us what is his: his righteousness, his uprightness, his incorruptibility.  

The Gospel according to John records one of the most dramatic moments in all of Scripture in this second chapter. John has already described Jesus this way: “the Word became flesh and took up residence among us” (John 1:14 NET—the Greek is literally, if colloquially, “pitched his tent among us”). Jesus, God-residing-among-us, comes to the temple in Jerusalem, the place designed to be his own house. He comes to see if he is welcome there.  

Instead of a house of prayers for bringing God’s life and people’s lives together, Jesus finds an emporium for merchants (John 2:16; Luke 19:46). Instead of a sanctuary for those who would humble themselves in the presence of the glory of God, he finds a monument to the ego of Herod that’s been forty-six years in the making (John 2:20). Instead of a venue for life-giving sacrifice, he finds an entrenched Sadducean, resurrection-denying aristocracy.  

“Destroy this building,” Jesus declares, “and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). When he offers his body as God’s new temple, he becomes in himself the place where God’s life and people’s lives come together, he becomes sanctuary to the humble, and he becomes the sacrifice that offers unending life. When he offers his body, he begins the construction project of God’s new and final temple. It’s a building that rises “living stone” by “living stone” (1 Peter 2:4–5). It’s a building made up of us: “Christ…was faithful over God’s house as a son, and we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope” (Hebrews 3:6).  

It is an unspeakably high honor to be that house. The challenge that comes to us from Deuteronomy, Hebrews, and John, in concert, is to hold to that honor with confidence and hope…for the sake of the world that God loves and that he will see re-consecrated to his glory.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+