Wednesday • 3/1/2023 •
Week of 1 Lent

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49–72; Deuteronomy 9:13–21; Hebrews 3:12–19; John 2:23–3:15

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 of the first week of Lent. We are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.

It was Lent when I first started attending worship at the Cathedral a number of years ago. Lent itself was an unfamiliar practice to me. It so happened, however, that some unexpected sadness had entered my life at that time. I felt that, sort of like Jesus in the wilderness, I had been shoved into a wilderness myself. As a result, I was looking for a worship experience that had room for pain, that was more than a cool song-set, more than happy-clappies. Worship that took into account people’s wilderness wanderings. I guess I was ready for Lent’s remembrance of Jesus’s forty days in his wilderness. 

“Then I lay prostrate before the Lord as before, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin you had committed, provoking the Lord by doing what was evil in his sight” — Deuteronomy 9:18. Twice, Moses prostrates himself before Yahweh at Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights. During each period, he becomes the bearer of a precious gift from God to us. 

First gift: Moses as messenger. When Moses says, “Then I lay prostrate before the Lord as before, forty days and forty nights,” he is reflecting that he had just been, with Yahweh, at the summit of Mount Sinai. There he had received, from the very finger of God, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. In bold strokes, those “Ten Words” sketched out what human life looks like when it is in sync with God’s own life. As his people, shaped by these very words into a “holy nation” and “treasured possession,” Israel was designed to be God’s gift to the world. Yahweh intended for them to manifest what life, lived into its fullness, looks like, a model and picture of the whole of humanity one day enjoying that life. A life, in the words of the Westminster Catechism, of “glorifying God and enjoying him forever.” Moses was to be the messenger of these words from God, and Israel was to be the messenger to the world. That’s the first gift. 

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

Second gift: Moses as mediator. The second gift stems from the fact that the giving and accepting of the first gift isn’t so simple. There’s a sin problem that has to be overcome before God’s Word can become good news for us. Even after their dramatic rescue from Egypt, God’s people are as much under sin’s domination as the rest of the world. As a result, during the very same forty days and nights that Moses spends atop Mount Sinai receiving God’s Word (the first time), the Israelites are below fashioning for themselves an idol. 

As a result, Moses spends a second forty days and forty nights prostrate before the Lord. This time he serves as mediator of the covenant, positioning himself between God’s righteous wrath and the people who are so deserving of it. It’s important to read this encounter in the larger context of the canon of Scripture, and especially of what is arguably its capstone verse, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16—from tomorrow’s Gospel reading). In today’s reading in John, the Pharisee Nicodemus visits Jesus. 

In that conversation, the Bible offers one of its many, many pictures of how the God who “so loved the world” provides a mediator to stand between us sinners and the punishment that we deserve: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15, quoting Numbers). 

During his second forty days and forty nights of prostration before the Lord, Moses prefigures a greater Mediator. The writer to the Hebrews will describe in our reading later this week that Jesus’s entire life among us is a kind of Lenten journey, in preparation for his suffering a mediating death on behalf of us sinners. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death (though the last phrase is literally, and more accurately, out of death)—Hebrews 5:7). 

As I learned in my first weeks at the Cathedral, Lent itself is an extraordinary gift. Lent invites us to remember Jesus in his wilderness, to remember him as an even greater Messenger and Mediator than Moses. In his wilderness, Jesus listens to God’s Word. In his wilderness, Jesus begins his mission to mediate life to us, to bring us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life” (BCP, p. 368). The writer to the Hebrews urges us to imitate Jesus rather than the Israelites in this regard, that we don’t let unbelief keep us from entering the Promised Land: “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end” (Hebrews 3:13–14). Lent invites us, in the words of the great Baptist hymn: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey.” 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+