Monday • 3/11/2024 •
Monday of 4 Lent, Year Two
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 89; Genesis 49:1–28; 1 Corinthians 10:14–11:1; Mark 7:24–37
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we explore that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. This is Monday of the fourth week of Lent, a season of preparation for Holy Week, and we are in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
Today’s passage in Genesis, comprised of Jacob’s words to his sons, is our next-to-next-to-last reading in that book before we turn to Exodus. The Book of Genesis is a book of “beginnings”: the beginning of creation, the beginning of the rule of sin and death, and the beginning of God’s campaign to restore creation. Here near the end of the book, Jacob captures the heart of the book.
To Reuben, Simeon, and Levi: dead ends to redemption. Reuben, Jacob’s firstborn son, has violated Bilhah, one of Jacob’s wives: “You went up to your father’s bed; then you defiled it” (Genesis 49:4b; see 35:22). In doing so, Reuben shows himself not to be what the firstborn should be: preeminent in dignity and power (Genesis 49:3). Rather, he is ungovernable, “uncontrolled as water” (Genesis 49:4a).
Simeon and Levi purport to bring to justice those who have violated their sister Dinah (Genesis 34:25–30). But they do so with self-willed, anarchic, viciousness. Their way is not God’s way: “Let my soul not enter into their council … Cursed be…their wrath, for it is cruel” (Genesis 49:6a,7ab).
Genesis is an account of the beginning of the rule of sin and death. Brutality and violence manifested themselves in family and home life immediately after the Fall of Adam and Eve: to wit, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel. Reuben, Simeon, and Levi illustrate hell’s hold on humans. And Genesis’s message to us in Jacob’s words to these three sons is twofold: 1) the family through which redemption comes needs redemption as much as anybody else; and 2) God will not solve the problem of the Fall through entitlement and pride like Simeon’s, nor will He reverse the curse through explosive, vindictive rage like Simeon’s and Levi’s.
To Judah: a king will come. Hope, however, does lie in the line of Judah. Somehow, as a gift of God’s profound grace, Jacob gets a threefold vision of how God will bring redemption through this son. First, Jacob has given him a name that means “Praise,” a fact that Jacob underscores when he says Judah’s brothers will “praise” him (Genesis 49:8 — yehudah comes from yadah). Worship is Israel’s chief gift to the world. When, in primordial history, through Cain the rest of the human race was given gifts of city-building and animal husbandry and manufacturing and music-making, through Seth the people of promise were given one gift, and one gift alone: “to invoke the name of Yahweh” (Genesis 4:16–26 JB). Through Israel, and specifically through the line of Judah, humanity will learn how praise of Yahweh gives value to every other aspect of life.
Second, Jacob calls Judah a “lion’s whelp,” and compares him to a crouching lion, “Like the king of beasts—who dare rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah” (Genesis 49:9,10). In Israel’s history, it is King David who embodies the hope engendered by Jacob’s words to Judah. The mighty “lion of Judah” becomes a theme of Jewish art and the basis of messianic expectation. The Book of Revelation identifies Jesus Christ as the great fulfillment of these words: “See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so he can open the scroll of the seven seals…” (Revelation 5:5).
Third, Jacob dimly perceives a mystery surrounding the identity of the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Older, more wooden, translations respect this mystery when they translate Genesis 49:10c, “…until Shiloh comes.” The term is really quite ambiguous — it could be a place, it could mean tribute, it could be a veiled reference to the Messiah as “Sent One.”
I’d prefer to leave the question of the interpretation of the term open. I think it may be here as a reminder that the Old Testament is a book filled with hints and shadows, adumbrations and whispers, figures and mysteries of marvelous and wonderful things to come. After all, when in the Book of Revelation John is permitted to see that Jesus is the great Lion of Judah, he also sees that he is simultaneously “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered,” and therefore worthy both to open the scrolls and “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:6,12).
Jacob’s son Judah will bequeath us a son —a Son like no other, a Son to teach the world to praise Yahweh, a Son to rule as King, and a Son to give his life a ransom for many.
To Joseph: a vision of creation restored. A promise of the re-Edenization of the world. Jacob’s words to Joseph climax in the vision of blessing flowing through Abraham’s line to all of creation, bringing in return the blessing of heaven above, of the deep that lies beneath, of the breasts and the womb, of fathers and ancestors, of everlasting hills. A vision of all creation released from the forces of death and decay and destruction and dissolution.
At its heart, Genesis is the story of the beginning of the end of the darkness that fell upon Eden. May this Lenten season prepare us to own the darkness of sin that led our Savior to his cruel cross, that we may rejoice anew in the promise of a new day that his resurrection on Easter Day brings.
Be blessed this day.
Reggie Kidd+