Thursday • 6/8/2023
Thursday of the First Week After Pentecost (Proper 4)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 50; Deuteronomy 16:18–20; 17:14–20; 2 Corinthians 8:1–16; Luke 18:1–8
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); 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 consider some aspect of 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. We are in the 1st Week After Pentecost, and our readings come from Proper 4 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Since the Fall, it’s become a confused and confusing world. It really has. According to the Bible’s story line, it won’t always be this way. And, praise be, the “new creation” that has been anticipated for the longest time has already invaded the present: “If anyone is in Christ, there is new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Christ’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, and present position at the right hand of the Father mean that history has turned a corner.
Image: Une Loterie philantropique, Honoré Daumier (France, Marseilles, 1808-1879), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Accommodations to the fall are still in place, though. They are temporary, but they are still necessary.
Luke: on persistence in prayer. So, even in our prayer lives, we need Jesus’s parable of the unjust judge. We need it, but not because God is disinclined to listen to us and can only be made to hear us because we pester him. No, we need this parable because we do not know how his counsels work or what his timeline looks like. We need to be persistent—as though he were hard of hearing and disinclined to do the right thing—even though we know he is not hard of hearing or disinclined to do the right thing. We need to ask and keep on asking—because prayer reminds us to whom we properly appeal for relief, for resolution, for answers.
Deuteronomy: on “judges” and “kings.” Similarly, in this fallen world, we know that “judges” do not judge justly nor do “kings” accept that God has “set them above” their people, yet not so that they may “exalt themselves over” their people. For that very reason, it is a very good thing to have standards of leadership set out in Scripture as points of accountability. We accept it as our duty to urge adherence to those standards, because we know the world works better that way, because people flourish that way, and because eventually, in God’s own timing, that’s the way it’s going to be.
2 Corinthians: on caring and sharing. Even in the church—the place that presently manifests God’s “new creation”— the confused and confusing effects of the fall have to be countered. Paul faces a huge instance here in 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9 as he addresses the Corinthians about their wealth.
It’s easy to get the wrong impression about the Corinthians. With a rhetorical flourish at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, Paul makes it sound to many readers like Corinth is home to an impoverished church: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. … But God chose …what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:26,28).
Reality is different than appearance, however. In the first place, all those “not many” phrases could very well be read “are not many?” (Apologies, it’s a curious feature of Greek.) In the second place, this church is plagued with problems of wealthy people throwing their weight around (whether in the minority or not): rich Christians are suing each other, and the “haves” are making the “have nots” eat separately at their supposed Lord’s Supper (see 1 Corinthians 6 and 11).
The apostle Paul has spent the better part of this his third missionary journey among the churches in Greece and western Asia Minor soliciting relief money. He has been raising funds from these mostly Gentile churches to provide for impoverished Jewish Christians in Judea. A combination of self-renunciation (see Acts 2:45; 4:32) and famine (see Acts 11:27–30) has left the Jerusalem mother church in dire straits. Paul sees the opportunity both to address the physical need and to help Gentile and Jewish believers realize their oneness in Christ.
Delicately and diplomatically, Paul seeks to reshape their understanding of how to use their wealth in light of God’s “new creation” that has taken hold in their lives. In 2 Corinthians Paul confronts them with the fact that a year earlier they made a commitment to support the impoverished church in Jerusalem and environs, but have not yet come through with their pledge. For two chapters of the densest Greek he is ever to pen, Paul discusses the topic of money without ever using the term. He employs various euphemisms instead. These chapters are especially redolent with the term “grace” (charis), referring to the theological concept (2 Corinthians 8:9), and as a stand-in term for “giving” money — 2 Corinthians 8:1,4,6).
Paul is at pains to let the Corinthians (and us) know several things:
We give because we have been given unto. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9 RSV).
We give as part of a whole Body of Christ because when one suffers all suffer (1 Corinthians 12:26), and because the whole Body works together to take care of itself (as Paul will later explain in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians).
God looks more for our desire to give than for the gift itself—though not the desire without the gift, either. (Thus, Paul’s delicate urging of the Corinthians to follow through on the pledge that they had made a year earlier.)
When it comes to “haves” giving to support “have nots,” it’s important to build in safeguards against condescending paternalism. There is a mutuality, a reciprocity, even an “equality” (isotēs) to be worked toward and understood. For the moment, these wealthy Greeks are the “haves,” and their impoverished Jewish brothers and sisters are the “have nots.” There’s no guarantee it will always be that way. Nor is it possible to put a price on the value of Jewish believers’ prayers for these recent Gentile converts. Priceless, in fact!
Not to mention the value to the whole world of the church’s modeling “new creation.” Since the Garden, the world has been devolving into rival nations, warring factions, mutually loathing ethnicities. Since the cross, where Christ united in himself Jew and Gentile, God has set forth his church as the place where those rivalries, and that warring and loathing end. Doubly priceless!!
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+