Tuesday • 8/8/2023
Tuesday of the Tenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 13)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 78; 2 Samuel 7:18–29; Acts 18:12–28; Mark 8:22–33
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)
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 Tuesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 13 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Mark: “men like trees walking.” In yesterday’s Gospel reading, Jesus denounced the reformist and pietistic way of the Pharisees and the secularist and accommodationist way of the Herodians. Today, he begins to unveil his own way. Today begins the campaign to show that the way of the cross is the way of life.
Today’s passage is the hinge on which Mark’s Gospel pivots to this theme.* Mark’s is the only gospel to tell the remarkable story of the blind man who, at Jesus’s first touch gains just enough sight to see blurred “men like trees walking,” and who thus needs a second touch from Jesus for his blindness to be completely cured and for him to “see everything clearly” (Mark 8:25).
Image: Adapted from: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Christ heals a blind man by placing clay on his eye. Stipple engraving by R.A. Artlett after J.D. Crittendon. By: John Denton Crittendonafter: Richard Austin ArtlettPublished: Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The account is a brilliant setup to Peter’s confession that Jesus is indeed the Christ (Peter “sees” the truth, but only with blurred vision—Mark 8:29). Peter’s confession requires Jesus’s further explanation that the mission of the Son of Man (i.e., the Christ) is to suffer, be rejected, die, and rise again (Peter and the other disciples must “see” this truth in order to “see everything clearly”—Mark 8:31–33). Twice more in chapters nine and ten, Jesus will have to outline his messianic mission (Mark 9:30-32; 10:32–34). He will round out the entire section with the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52), a miracle that does not have to be repeated, coming as it does on the far side of the full explanation that, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
There is good reason for the BCP’s prayer: “Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP, p. 99, 220, 272, 420). Life and peace come by means of the cross, not by self-fixes, and not by system-fixes.
Acts: learning “the way of God.” The account of Apollos, Priscilla, and Aquila in Acts shows how “the way of the cross” turns out to be “the way of life and peace.”
Apollos, a Jewish Christian from Alexandria, is a brilliant student both of Scripture and of contemporary rhetoric (Acts 18:24). He has been well instructed in the “the things of Jesus” (18:25), meaning apparently that he is well acquainted with the life and teachings of Jesus, and with the ways that Jesus fulfills Old Testament promises about the coming of the Messiah (Acts 18:25a). Moreover, he glows with the fire of the Spirit (zeōn tō pneumati). Curiously, however, his understanding of baptism only extends to John’s baptism of preparatory repentance (Acts 18:24–25). His experience is of a piece with the fluid relationship between faith, repentance, water-baptism, and Spirit-baptism in the book of Acts. However, there appears to be something he doesn’t quite understand about the faith.
Priscilla and Aquila nicely display “the way of the cross” by the way they minister to Apollos.
First, when they decide to address deficiencies in his presentations in Ephesus, they do so privately not publicly. Rather than calling him out in front of everybody else, they take him aside for “more accurate” instruction (Acts 18:26).
Second, they sense the need to augment his accurate understanding of “the things of Jesus,” the facts about Jesus’s life, ministry, and Messiahship. These facts will be powerful weapons in Apollos’s arsenal to persuade people to become Christians. But Priscilla and Aquila know that there is more to “the things of Jesus” than just getting people’s intellectual assent about those facts. Potential believers will need, and thus Apollos will need, to understand “the way of God” (Acts 18:26). Apollos needs to understand that there is a way of living that follows from those facts.
Apollos receives the Ephesian church’s blessing to cross the Aegean Sea to minister in Achaia (Greece), in the city of Corinth (Acts 18:27). There he is greatly helpful. Yet, as we will see in a few weeks when we read 1 Corinthians (Propers 19–24), misunderstandings emerge in Corinth. Having lived among the Corinthians themselves, Priscilla and Aquila understand the Corinthians’ susceptibility to impressive rhetoric and powerful spiritual display. They want Apollos to understand that “the way of God” is the way of humility and service.
Apollos is an excellent example of the way that many of us must learn that our strengths can also be our weaknesses. Our strengths must be diligently and relentlessly yoked to Christ and his cross. Paul tells the Corinthians not to pit him and Apollos against each other: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). The “way of God” is not about taking pride in who baptized you, or about how hyper-intellectual your faith is, or about how super-spiritual your experience of God is. The “way of God” is the way of the cross.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
*Slightly altered here, this and the following two paragraphs appeared in the DDD for Wednesday of this year’s Week 4 of Epiphany.