Friday • 4/8/2022
Friday of 5 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 22; Exodus 9:13-35; 2 Corinthians 4:1-12 (plus tomorrow’s 4:13–18); Mark 10:32-45

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 14 (Song of Moses, Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 94)

In our church we begin each Lenten season with the Great Litany. In that prayer we cry out: “From lightning and tempest, from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence. and famine, Good Lord, deliver us. From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us” (BCP, p. 149). Today’s readings provide an exceptional wrap to Lent.

Exodus: Plagues 6 and 7: Boils & Hail. The plagues against the Egyptians become more severe. The plague of hail is the first of the plagues to threaten human life. But then, just as the threat accelerates, so does God’s counsel to provide and to seek shelter (Exodus 9:19-21). An offer of mercy during judgment, shelter in the storm.

Lord of heaven and earth, when storms sweep our world—whether they are storms of sickness or of conflict or of natural disaster—may they quickly pass. Protect those who provide what shelter they can. Have mercy, Lord, and spare lives. Soften and transform hearts that have been hardened into indifference to your presence. Reclaim hearts that have drifted into inattention to your care for them. Good Lord, deliver us.

Psalm 22 anticipates, by a thousand years, Jesus descending into the abyss of abandonment to death (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), so he could rise to lead the praise of the God who rescues those “that fear him … the poor in their poverty … those who worship him … all the families of the earth … all who go down to the dust … [and] … a people yet unborn” (Psalm 22:1, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30). What a powerful prelude to Holy Week!

Lord Jesus, Friend to sufferers, there’s no pain we’ve felt that you have not felt, no fear that’s unfamiliar to you, no loss that has not touched you. Please be near to all those for whom you have given your life in agony and rejection. Please strengthen especially those who feel most abandoned and forgotten. Remind them that you are there: a very present help in time of trouble. Good Lord, deliver us.

Thus, it makes sense that in Mark 10, as Jesus heads for Jerusalem and Holy Week, he makes it crystal clear to his followers that the kind of power he embodies and is preparing to release into the world through his death and resurrection is not available to the ambitious, the proud, and the self-promoting: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42–44).

Hard times — when there are “boils” and “hail” aplenty — are a great equalizer. You may have been important in the “before times,” or you may have been unimportant. You may have had a voice, or not. We can take Jesus at his word: neither our pretensions nor our inadequacies were ever in the least relevant. All that matters is the generous heart of the One who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Lord Jesus, Son of Man, show me this heart. Make me glad in the service of the One who gave his life a ransom. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.

2 Corinthians 4: apt words to close out Lent. The apostle Paul marvels at the way God places the light of knowing him in the hearts of his people. We are as frail and fragile, and as broken, as clay lanterns that have been put back together with semi-transparent glue. God lets his light shine out all the brighter through the cracks: “For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4:6–7).

We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus — 2 Corinthians 4:14. What’s at stake in the question of whether on that first Easter Sunday Jesus actually, literally, bodily rose from the dead isn’t just the truthfulness of the Apostles’ claims that he did so. (Not that truthfulness isn’t important for its own sake. It is.) More critical than the bare fact of Jesus’s resurrection, though, is its meaning. Because the Father raised Jesus from the dead, insists Paul, he “will raise us also with Jesus.” If Jesus rose, we will rise. Really. If he didn’t, we won’t either—at death we’re done (at best).

Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day — 2 Corinthians 4:16. Believing that Jesus’s resurrection is sure, and that your own resurrection is secure—such believing brings an equilibrium that can face the inevitable: “wasting away.” Sometimes that “wasting away” is a long and graceful glide. Sometimes it’s an abrupt and ugly crash. Sometimes it’s a protracted and brutal deterioration. Regardless, it can be faced with equipoise and peace.

I’ve been in ministry long enough to have seen too many people so desperately pinning their hopes on the preservation of this physical body. When faced with news of terminal disease, they spent their remaining months, weeks, or days, in denial of what was happening to them. Claiming a “healing” that wasn’t going to come, they became distant from the God they thought they must be disappointed because of a lack of faith. They deprived themselves of the opportunity to experience what Paul describes here: “our inner nature is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). Good Lord, deliver us.

We do not lose heart…because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal — 2 Corinthians 4:16, 18. I’ve known others who knew where they were going, and were thus able to entrust themselves to the Lord who knew the way.

When the transitory nature of this life hits you in the face like a two-by-four, you can’t help but stop, and say, “What just happened?” The gift of that jolt can be the dawning recognition of a singular grace: the opportunity to pay attention to, and to nurture, the inner self through cultivating friendship with God.

I suppose that’s why it’s become so important to me to begin the day with the Daily Office’s Scriptures, Canticles, and Prayers—sometimes basking in them, sometimes puzzling over them, sometimes letting them flow over me. And writing devotions like these is part of what reminds me of the difference between what is merely temporary and what is eternal.

If this Lenten season has reminded you just how frail you are, how tentative all your plans need to be, how impossible it is to place all your hopes in this life, I pray you find something being “renewed day by day” deep within you: the abiding sense that “this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory…” (2 Corinthians 3:17).

God of Light, you who make your light to shine in the darkest of places, shine the light of your glory through the cracks of our frailty. Perfect your strength in our weakness, and give all our brothers and sisters a joy this Easter that comes in the very midst of trials and tribulations. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Chris Hunkeler from Carlsbad, California, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons