Monday • 4/24/2023 •
Week of 3 Easter
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 25; Daniel 4:19–27; 1 John 3:19–4:6; Luke 4:14–30
This morning’s Canticles are: before the Psalm reading, Pascha Nostrum (“Christ Our Passover,” BCP, p. 83); 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 Third Week of Easter, and we are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary. “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”
1 John.
Antichrist to come, and antichrist already. The early church understood that Christ’s victory over sin and death prompted a Satanic counterattack. Peter likens Satan to a mortally wounded lion in desperate, if deadly, death throes. Paul expects history to culminate in Christ dealing a final crushing blow to a “man of lawlessness” who will mount a final assault on God’s people. Paul also recognizes the “spirit of lawlessness” already at work in the world, and against which the church must strive until the end. John has an identical view: he predicts the rise of “antichrist” towards the end of history, whom Christ will dispatch at his glorious return. Like Paul, John sees this future evil already in play in the world, attacking the church through “many antichrists,” and operating under the influence of “the spirit of antichrist.”
Christ “coming in the flesh.”
Do not believe every spirit. That’s why it’s crucial, says John, for the church to discern the Spirit of God, the Advocate whom Jesus promised to send, and who would lead us into all truth. For the “spirit of antichrist” will speak falsities intended to lead us away from God and the life he has for us.
One way to tell it’s the spirit of antichrist that we are hearing is when we recognize that it is advocating for “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:15). That voice is all around us, encouraging, as we noted last week, the seductions of illicit physical pleasure (“the lust of the flesh”), of the idolizing of beauty (“the lust of the eyes”), and of the pride of building our “brand” (“the pride of life”—1 John 2:15b RSV). A dismissive attitude toward the church’s and Israel’s long history and experience that exudes the first deadly sin: pride. A politics of class and racial resentment that feeds the second deadly sin: envy. Making social problems about “systems” in such a way as to ignore the poison of the fourth deadly sin: sloth. An aesthetic that glorifies amassing wealth and that makes us effete snobs about everything we consume (“O dear God, I’d die before I drank rot gut coffee!”), surrendering, “in the day of slaughter” (James 4:5), to the fifth and sixth deadly sins: avarice and gluttony. A championing of sexual liberation that capitulates to the demands of the seventh deadly sin: lust.
This is the commandment… But in the end, John keeps it simple for us. There’s one commandment with two dimensions that he’d have us focus on: “Believe in the name of [God’s] Son Jesus…” (that is, the fullness of who he is and what he has done, is doing, and will do for us) “…and love one another” (thus fleshing out, almost as an extension of the incarnation, the reality of the eternal communion of love here on earth—1 John 3:23).
Collect for the Third Sunday of Easter. O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+