Tuesday • 5/9/2023 •
Week of 5 Easter
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 61; Psalm 62; Daniel 10:1–21; Romans 12:1–21; Luke 8:1–15
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 Fifth Week of Easter, and we are in Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary. “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”
Daniel: a conflict in the heavens. An angelic figure (maybe Gabriel?) appears to Daniel (Daniel 10:2–9), in order to bring word of a great conflict in the heavens (Daniel 10:1). It is a message regarding a battle between God’s protecting angels (Gabriel and Michael) and enemy angels (the “angel of Persia” and the “angel of Greece”).
Image: Bonifazio Veronese , CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The conflict Gabriel describes is to take place “…at the end of days” (Daniel 10:14), a reference that seems to have a double meaning: first, what’s to happen following the end of the Babylonian exile of God’s people, when Jerusalem and its temple have been rebuilt; and second, what’s to happen in the remote future, after the completed work of the Messiah (as predicted in Daniel 7 and 9).
Above our earthly strife and cares, asserts Daniel, a heavenly war is being waged. A lively sense of this reality carries over into the New Testament. Jesus sees a heavenly analogue for the disciples’ ministry, as he exclaims upon the return of the seventy from their successful mission: “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Luke 10:18). Jesus sees his being lifted up on the cross as effecting the devil’s being cast down: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:31–32). Christ’s cross de-fangs Satan’s forces, according to Paul, and at the same time thrusts us into a battle against those very same powers and principalities (Colossians 2 and Ephesians 6). The risen and ascended Jesus tells Paul that the effect of the gospel ministry among Gentiles will be “to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18).
The final chapters of Daniel’s prophecies are among the several hints the Old Testament gives us that the heavens themselves were divided among evil powers aligned with an arrogant Lucifer (Isaiah 14:12’s “Son of the Morning;” see also Ezekiel 28:1–28; Job 1–2), and the angelic host loyal to Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts. At the Fall, a rift opened between heaven and earth, and it brought with it a rift among us as well. Death took hold of the human race, breaking our relationship with God, and setting us against one another. As a whole, the Bible’s story is all about the putting down of the Satanic rebellion, the healing of the rift between heaven and earth, and the reunification of our fractured human race.
Romans: our task on earth. I think of these verses in Romans as Paul’s “Desiderata” (“things desired”). And I think of them often, for they are verses worth returning to time and time again. They remind us how distinctive God’s “Desiderata” are—say, in contrast to Max Ehrmann’s poem “Desiderata.” Contrary to what Erhmann says in his poem, things were not “unfolding as [they] should.” Instead, Christ has set at work the power of reconciliation and reunion: “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19). By the mercies of the God who has adopted enemies into his family by giving up his own Son for us (as opposed to our being entitled “children of the universe” who “have a right to be here”), we participate in the reunification of heaven and earth and the restoration of peace among humans. We do so by submitting our bodies, says Paul in today’s epistle, as a “living, holy and acceptable sacrifice, which is [our] spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).
In this kind of lifestyle worship, we sacrifice our ego by not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3). We give up our individualism by recognizing that we are mutually dependent members of the multi-faceted Body of Christ (Romans 12:4–5). We lose our envy of others by gratefully and generously stewarding our own particular gift (Romans 12:6–8). We walk away from the toxicity of bitterness by blessing and praying for those who persecute and curse us (Romans 12:14). We give up our need for revenge by putting wrongs done against us into the Lord’s hands. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).
In all this, well aware of the cosmic struggle that Gabriel revealed to Daniel, we take our part in what Paul calls our own struggle against powers and principalities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12–20). To be sure, Christ has already disarmed the still-rebellious heavenly powers at work in Daniel’s day, in Christ’s day, in Paul’s day, and even now in ours (Colossians 2:15). One day, those powers will be completely and thoroughly vanquished. In the meantime, by our life in the Body of Christ—brothers and sisters living lives of “mutual affection,” of “outdoing one another in showing honor,” and of “feeding our enemies” (Romans 12:10,20)—we signal to those heavenly powers and their evil Overlord their doom. Living out Paul’s “Desiderata,” we the body of Christ make “known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” the “wisdom of God in its rich variety” (Ephesians 3:8,10).
Be blessed this day.
Reggie Kidd+