Tuesday • 4/25/2023 •
Week of 3 Easter
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Daniel 4:28–37; 1 John 4:7–21; Luke 4:31–37
This morning’s Canticles are: before the Psalm reading, Pascha Nostrum (“Christ Our Passover,” BCP, p. 83); 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 Easter, and we are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary. “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”
Pride, a very bad idea. In Daniel 4, King Nebuchadnezzar’s pride and boasting results in the humiliation Daniel predicted from an earlier dream of the king. The boastful king is driven from human society. He becomes like a wild animal, with long hair and fingernails, eating grass like an ox. When at length he repents and acknowledges the Most High as the true and eternal king, he is restored to his throne, and he praises God: “I blessed the Most High,and praised and honored the one who lives forever. For his sovereignty is an everlasting sovereignty, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation” (Daniel 4:34). He confesses, “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are truth, and his ways are justice and he is able to bring low those who walk in pride” Daniel 4:37).
Image: William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The first and deadliest sin is pride. It destroyed Lucifer. It robbed Adam and Eve of Paradise. But for the intervention of the King of heaven with his severe mercy, it nearly took down Nebuchadnezzar (“Is this not magnificent Babylon, which I have built as a royal capital by my mighty power and for my glorious majesty?” — Daniel 4:30). If, like the ancient king of Babylon, we “walk in pride” and the Lord’s love brings us low, may we be ever grateful.
Love, a most excellent idea. John’s tribute to the love of God is best encapsulated in a series of propositions.
Love is who God is. “God is love,” says 1 John 4:16. That is because God is an eternal fellowship of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That eternal fellowship is part of what John assumed when he wrote in his Gospel, “…the Word was God, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1). There is an impenetrable mystery to God’s being that Italian poet Dante memorably captured: “And I believe in three Eternal Persons. And these I do believe to be one essence so single and threefold as to allow both is and are” (Paradiso 24). What’s not a mystery at all, however, is that love is not an afterthought to God’s being, because God is inherently a relationship of love. God has always loved. God will always love, because it’s who he is.
Love is what God does. Out of love, God created. Out of love, God sent his Son. And he didn’t send him for good people, he sent him for the likes of us. He sent him for bad people. He sent him as “hilasmos for sin” — that is, as a propitiatory sacrifice to satisfy justice and to avert the wrath (1 John 4:10). There’s no way around that uncomfortable truth. It highlights the amazing depth of the love of God. God loves sinners so much he sent his Son for them. To repeat, love is what God does.
Love is what God works in us, and looks for from us. God does look for love from us, but he does not expect us to manufacture it from within ourselves. He gives us his Spirit to create within us his own reservoir of love: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4:13). More and more, by the Spirit, the love that God is becomes who we are. More and more, by the Spirit, what God does out of love becomes what we do out of love.
Love is how the invisible God becomes visible to the world. “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). The reason the Second Commandment tells us not to make images of God is that God has already fashioned his own images: humans. “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our own likeness…” (Genesis 1:26). We are the way the invisible God intends to make himself visible in the world he has created. We have been designed to mirror his creativity in the things we make. He made us to mirror his passions in our love for the good, and hatred for what is evil. And while we may construct cathedrals to call attention to his grandeur and beauty, many people will never step across the threshold of those buildings. For them, the only view of God’s grandeur and beauty is the way we treat one another.
“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”
Be blessed in that love this day,
Reggie Kidd+