Wednesday • 3/8/2023 •
Week of 2 Lent
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 72; Jeremiah 3:6–18; Romans 1:28–2:11; John 5:1-18
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 second week of Lent. We are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
Sin is powerful, pernicious, and pervasive.
Despite being called to be God’s loving bride (Jeremiah 2:1), God’s people (Judah in the south even more than Israel in the north) allow themselves to be charmed into committing spiritual adultery with false gods (Jeremiah 3:6–11). That’s how powerful sin is.
Sin can make us so conditioned to its rule over our lives, that we, like the lame man in John 5, wouldn’t have a strong answer, if the Lord of healing approached and asked, “Do you want to be healed?” Sin can make us so mean-spirited that we, like the Jewish inquisitors in John 5, can find fault in the face of the most amazing of manifestations of goodness. That’s how pernicious sin is.
For Paul, people’s imaginative capacities are inexhaustible when it comes to inventing and justifying sin. Perhaps the height (or nadir) of those sinful capacities is our facility for being “judgy” towards others whose sins we fancy to be worse than our own: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (Romans 2:1). That’s how pervasive sin is.
God’s justice is unalterable.
There are, however, two great “nonethelesses.” First, regardless of how cleverly we justify ourselves, God’s justice stands. Every single one of us has an intuitive sense that right is right, and wrong is wrong. That’s a whisper from God. The Bible declares its truth. We cannot change the rules of the cosmos because we didn’t create the cosmos. The Creator did, and he governs it by his rules. Not ours. His rule is: “For [God] will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. … God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:6–8,10).
Each one of us must give an answer. Each one of us confronts the choice of which direction our life faces: God-wards or self-wards. Nobody is exempt.
Image: “Rise and Walk” by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
God’s kindness is even more unalterable.
The other great “nonetheless” is how powerful, restorative, and personal God’s kindness is. Jeremiah had not been sent just to destroy idolatrous pretension, but also to invite a return to the God who had never stopped loving his people: “Return, faithless Israel, says the Lord. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, says the Lord; I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt, …” (Jeremiah 3:12–13a). Eventually, Jeremiah will promise a covenant in which God will transform the hearts of intransigent sinners: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). That’s how powerful God’s kindness is.
Paul says that God extends a patience that is designed to lead us to repent (Romans 2:4), and Paul writes to the end that stubborn-hearted people will do just that. When Jesus encounters the man who, somehow over the course of thirty-eight years, had not managed to get to the healing waters that were mere feet away from him, Jesus powers through the man’s lame excuses, and heals him anyway. While the legalists made sabbath-keeping a matter of virtue-signaling and pious one-upmanship, Jesus healed on the sabbath, showing the sabbath to be a picture of rest and re-creation. That’s how restorative God’s kindness is.
Jesus’s interrogators rightly understood that the way in which Jesus called God “my Father” meant that he was making a special claim for himself. Jesus likened his work of healing on the sabbath to his Father’s continuing to uphold and sustain all of creation (obviously including even on the sabbath). Like Father, like Son. Jesus’s opponents recognized his claim for what it was: he was calling “God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God” (John 5:18). They think it’s blasphemous. To the contrary, Jesus is about to explain to them (in the following verses) the authenticity of his deity.
What John is unfolding in his Gospel is the amazing reality that God’s kindness isn’t an immaterial attribute. God’s kindness is personal. More than that, God’s kindness is a Person. As Paul will later put it, commenting on Jesus’s incarnation: “…when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us…” (Titus 3:4–5a). In Jesus, God’s kindness has become a person—not an abstraction. He’s come to rescue, not an abstract humanity, but actual flesh and blood people. Like you and me.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+