Tuesday • 8/30/2022

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Job 12:1, 13:3-17,21-27 (per BCP) or Job 12:1; 13:1-27; Acts 12:1-17; John 8:33-47

This morning’s Canticles are: 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)

An audio or video version of this devotional can be found here: Apple Podcast, Spotify Podcast, YouTube

Today’s readings offer life-giving “takes” on freedom.

Job’s freedom to be honest with his friends. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom! … Will you speak falsely for God, and speak deceitfully for him? … Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay. — Job 13:5,7,12. 

Job’s freedom to be honest about his approach to God. See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face. This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him. — Job 13:15-16. 

Job feels free enough to speak honestly to God even if it is in an angry and frustrated fashion. He is free from the need to “speak falsely for God.” One simple lesson from today’s Old Testament reading: it’s better to say, “I don’t get it,” than to pretend that you do.    

Jesus’s promise of freedom. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. — John 8:36. 

Jesus’s deniers are certainly not free, despite their protests to the contrary. They are children of their father the devil, and can only do his bidding. The devil is a “murderer” and a “liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44), and so they can only believe a lie and wreak destruction on the people around them. 

The opponents in Jesus’s dialogue are defining themselves by their lineage: “We are descendants of Abraham,” they say, “and have never been slaves to anyone” (John 8:33). (Let’s ignore for the moment Israel’s actual history, as well as the fact that they are living under occupation by the Roman army where their freedoms are restricted.) For Jesus’s opponents, their ancestry is their identity. And thus they are trapped. They can’t see that there is a higher calling, something greater than ethnic identity and loyalty. Failing to recognize that Jesus comes from the Heavenly Father, they show themselves to belong to the family of the one that Jesus calls “your father the devil” (John 8:44). 

Implication: To the extent that I identify myself in terms of my background or heritage, my “fill-in-the-blankness,” I cannot see that the source of genuine freedom is knowing, loving, and being loved by Jesus Christ. Not only that, but defining life through loyalty to “my group” forces me to define other people only in terms of how like, or unlike, “my group” is to “their group.”  In one of his most direct declarations thus far in John’s gospel, Jesus pronounces these people to be children of “your father the devil.” They are living in hell on earth. Lord Jesus, give me the freedom of the truth that in you, and in you only, lies all freedom, personal meaning, and power to inspire life in others. 

Peter is freed from jail by an angelic visitation. Such power! With a touch of humor, Luke notes that when Peter knocks at the door, Rhoda the servant girl is so excited that she leaves him in the street while she runs back inside to tell everybody the good news. And, curiously, after this reunion, Peter “left and went to another place” (Acts 8:17). Indeed, he had plenty of work to do elsewhere, eventually rounding out his ministry, it appears, in Rome (1 Peter 5:13). 

God, give us grace to believe that you have the power to remove whatever binds us: from determining who we are by where we come from, from feeling we can’t be honest with you about our hurts, or from any chains (physical or spiritual) that would hold us back from the ministry to which you have called us. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Alonso Cano , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons