Tuesday • 3/5/2024 •
Tuesday of 3 Lent, Year Two
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 78; Genesis 45:1–15; 1 Corinthians 7:32–40; Mark 6:1–13
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 third week of Lent, as we prepare for Holy Week, and we are in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
The very heart of biblical faith lies in Joseph’s response to his brothers: “It was not you who sent me here, but God….”
Joseph’s confidence in God’s guiding hand. Joseph has all along sensed that God was preserving him and protecting him. Joseph knows a God who brings about good despite and even through all the evil thrust upon him. All of it — being attacked and sold by these very brothers, being taken as a slave into Egypt, being falsely accused by Pharaoh’s wife, and being forgotten by Pharaoh’s cupbearer — all of it Joseph understood to be firmly in the grip of a higher hand that was working a larger purpose toward a good end. That end was good for Joseph himself, good for those he cared about, good for the whole world. He assures his brothers: “So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt” (Genesis 45:8).
Joseph’s heart of compassion. It’s easy to think that believing in God’s benevolent control of all things, including evil, leaves one with a cold, calculating determinism. As though people’s choices don’t matter, and as though people’s hurts along the way don’t matter either. As though “happy endings” come out of a divinely preprogrammed “Goodness” dispenser. But that’s not the case at all. Ours is not an unfeeling God, and he has made us to feel with feelings he has given us. Joseph is emotionally engaged with what’s happening around him.
In today’s reading Joseph has carefully orchestrated things in such a way as to give his brothers a chance to recognize their sin and be transformed by grace. Beholding a breakthrough on that front releases a flood of tears. When he sees his brother Judah’s willingness to exchange his own freedom for their youngest brother Benjamin, “Joseph could no longer control himself … he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it … Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept … And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them…” (Genesis 45:1,2,14,15).
Image: Adaptation, Pixabay image
The nimbleness of a redeemed person’s spirit is that they can be stricken with grief over their own sufferings and failings and over the sufferings and failings of others — and at the same time confident that God has the capacity and the intent to turn the worst evil into good. The God of the Bible creates beauty out of ugliness, peace out of strife, and order out of chaos.
Scripture is filled with the understanding that God can use evil to effect his own good purposes. Fearlessly, the formerly craven Peter proclaims to the Sanhedrin that God had raised from the dead the one they had crucified: the stone the builder had rejected has become the cornerstone. The ultimate evil-into-good, of course, is the prayer recited by the Jerusalem church after Peter and John are released from prison:
“Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth, the sea, and everything in them, it is you who said by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant:
‘Why did the Gentiles rage,
and the peoples imagine vain things?
The kings of the earth took their stand,
and the rulers have gathered together
against the Lord and against his Messiah.’
For in this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. And now, Lord, look at their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:24b–30; citing Psalm 2:1–2).
God brought the greatest good (the salvation of the world) out of the greatest evil (the unjust crucifixion of his own Son). There’s no good thing he cannot accomplish, today, or in the future. And he promises that there will be not one iota of evil that will prevail on the last day. Whether it’s “turn[ing] the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents … and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous” (Malachi 4:6; Luke 1:16b), or whether it’s calling off the dogs of war or breathing godliness back into an apostate culture or taming deadly disease or addressing debilitating poverty and perverse racial and ethnic enmity—none of it is beyond him.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+