Friday • 8/11/2023
Friday of the Tenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 13)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 88; 2 Samuel 12:1–14; Acts 19:21–41; Mark 9:14–29
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); 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 bring to our lives 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 Friday in the Season After Pentecost. We are in Proper 13 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
2 Samuel: when you discover you are a monster. Through the prophet Nathan’s parable about a rich man who steals his neighbor’s favorite ewe, David realizes he is a monster. He has stolen his neighbor’s wife, and he has committed murder to cover his transgression. He confesses his sin (the content of which he captures in Psalms 51 and 32). Nathan pronounces him forgiven, but also outlines consequences he will not be able to escape.
Mark: Jesus’s frontal assault on evil. Sin’s grip on us can be subtle and covert or it can be not subtle and overt. Many, probably most, of us keep our sinning under cover. In today’s account in Mark, however, Jesus confronts evil head on. I thank God that Jesus showed his power to confront demonic oppression directly. I thank God that he mounted the cross to conquer the “prince of the power of the air” on his own turf (as Athanasius so nicely put it). And I thank God for those in the church whom he has called and gifted even today to discern direct demonic activity in people’s lives and to call upon Jesus’s exorcizing power.
Image: "Ephesus Archaelogical Museum, Seljuk" by hugh llewelyn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Acts: Paul’s subtle assault on idolatry. Paul’s promotion of Christ prompts pushback from those whose livelihoods depend upon the veneration of Artemis, Ephesus’s patron deity. It does not appear, however, that Paul has launched a frontal anti-Artemis campaign. His approach is more subtle. He has preached Christ, and people have made their own inferences: if Christ is lord, then Artemis can’t be. And they are right!
I never ceased to be amazed at the profundity of the apostle Paul’s ministry strategy. Ephesians worship a rock that had supposedly fallen from heaven centuries beforehand. Ephesians named the rock “Artemis” and built a shrine to it/her that was so magnificent the structure was considered one of the “Seven Wonders of the World.” According to an A.D. 2nd century inscription, in exchange for the city’s being the nurturer (hē trophos) of this rock, Artemis had made the city “most radiant in glory” (endoxatera).*
According to his letter to the Ephesians, Paul’s teaching, by contrast, is that Christ nurtures (ektrephein) the church, his bride, and makes her “radiant in glory” as a free gift (endoxa — Ephesians 5:27,29). And while the cheers to Artemis will go up for two hours, “Great is Artemis! Great is Artemis!” (see Acts 19:28), Paul will write to Timothy, his ministry-delegate in Ephesus, that what is “great” is something quite different: “[G]reat is the mystery of godliness” (1 Timothy 3:16a). And at the heart of Paul’s “great mystery of godliness” is not a lifeless rock, but “the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus … who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 2:5; 3:16). The great mystery of godliness is Jesus, not a deaf, unfeeling rock.
The whole thing invites a pondering of how powerfully Jesus challenges people’s basic religious assumptions and spiritual instincts — including our own. Before what lifeless and meaningless “rocks” are we inclined to prostrate ourselves? Do I seek solace in food or drink or Netflix or gambling? Do I hope for meaning in life from success in work or school or investments or politics?
How, by contrast, does “the one mediator, the man Christ Jesus … the great mystery of godliness,” breathe life into the dead spaces in our lives?
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
*R. Oster, “Holy days in honor of Artemis,” in G. H. R. Horsley, ed., New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, Volume 4 (MacQuarie University, 1987), No. 19, pp. 75–75.