Daily Office Readings 1/17/25

 

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Friday, Jan 17, 2025: Psalms 16, 17, 22, Isaiah 42: 1-17, Ephesians 3:1-13, Mark 2:13-22

Today picks up closely where yesterday’s readings left off, and not only because the readings in Isaiah, Ephesians, and Mark are the verses immediately following. The theme is the same: God’s redemption is simultaneously surprising and inexplicable. Isaiah 42 recounts God’s version of setting things right (42:1-4), God’s immense power to create and thus God’s power to create anew (42:5-9), the response of the whole of God’s creation to God (42:10-13), and, finally, the reading ends with the surprising and inexplicable things God will be doing in this creating anew, this setting things right (42:14-17). It involves nothing less than things becoming what they are not. 

It is this imagery that Ephesians picks up in chapter 3. What God has done in creating one people out of the previously divided two is the very undoing of what was and the making of it into what it was not. Once, the people were divided in two, but now they are united as one (Eph 2:11-22). It is, as Ephesians 3:1 labels it “a mystery”. What better word could there be for rivers becoming islands? For mountains becoming flat places, for darkness becoming light? What better word is there for the crucified, shamed, and cursed man Jesus, to be not only alive, but Messiah and Lord, the most honored, the one before every knee will one day bow, the one of whom every tongue will confess that he is Lord (Phil 2:10-11)? It is an economy of God’s grace that only becomes clear through an apocalypse, a revelation, as Ephesians labels it (3:2-3). The very hiddenness of it is what makes it a mystery, along with the profundity of what has been and is being accomplished.

Thus, the pairing with Mark 2:13-22 highlights the apocalyptic (or revelatory) nature of Jesus’s presence among Israel and humanity. These verses play out the second and third in the set of five conflicts that open Jesus’s ministry in Capernaum. The first, yesterday, was over the power to forgive sins. The second here concerns who is worthy to join the table (and possibly if we allow the language of Ephesians to intrude a bit, the household) of Jesus. The third concerns proper pious conduct as the people of God, specifically a practice of fasting. Jesus’s presence in each instance changes what is obviously true, becoming right and true only through the revelation of a mystery. In yesterday’s healing of the paralytic, everyone “knows” only God can forgive sins, but Jesus’s ability to change another thing that everyone knows (paralytics don’t walk without the power of God) proves his authority to forgive sins. In Mark 2:13-17, everyone knows you shouldn’t eat with those kinds of people (tax collectors and sinners), but Jesus’s presence reveals something different: God’s healing (given the doctor imagery in v. 17) is exactly for those kinds of people, it is God “opening the eyes of the blind” and bringing out “the prisoners from the dungeon” and darkness (Is 42:7), it is God “leading the blind by a road they do not know” (Is 42:16). Once again God’s planning and action are mysterious and a matter of revelation (Eph 3). Finally, Mark 2:18-22 as the center conflict of the five takes on a particular climactic place in that Jesus’s presence as “Son of Man” means not that the standard forms of pious worship (e.g. fasting) should be even more adhered to, but rather it means the opposite of those pious activities: the presence of the Son of Man requires feasting and celebration. In some sense it requires this exactly because the mysterious-to-be-revealed plan involves the departure of the Son of Man. Things are not as they seem. God’s creative power takes things that are and makes them something they are not. God’s redemptive power is surprising and inexplicable.

Lingering Questions and thoughts: 1) Why does the LXX (Greek OT) remove the first half of Is 42:15, only mentioning the rivers becoming islands? 

2) The NRSV has translated the Greek οἰκονομία in consistently and in interesting ways. In Eh 3:2, the translators give “the commission (οἰκονομία) of God’s grace”, while the similar phrase in 3:9 is rendered “the plan (οἰκονομία) of the mystery”. These renderings don’t necessarily get us close to either the active element of the word or the household metaphorical realm the term implies. It’s not just a one-time commissioning of Paul as it may sound, but rather an ongoing and repeated entrusting of the working out of God’s grace in the realm of these people, the people made one out of the previously two. In addition, it is not some plan that has been decided from the foundations of time and just left to work itself out, like God is some divine computer coder who wrote the code and then hit execute. Rather, it is an ongoing negotiation of planning and replanning as the dynamic nature of the real existence in this household realm (that God has created out of the formerly two peoples, but now one people) plays out in real time. This is part of what makes it mysterious. Moreover, the household context is essential because of all that has been said in chapter two concerning the creation of one people. This people is the household of God.

Daily Office Readings for 1/16/25

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Thursday, Jan 16, 2025: Psalm 18, Isaiah 41: 17-29, Ephesian s 2:11-22, Mark 2:1-12

Thematically, today’s readings hold together in the question of who is truly a god and by what actions is the true God to be known. Isaiah 41 is the lynchpin in my reading. Verse 20 gives a purpose clause for God’s actions as narrated earlier: “so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this…” The remainder of the chapter follows up on this asking of the past (v 22) and then of the future (v 23), then moving into action as the witness to who is truly divine. So, we learn from vv. 17-19 that this true God is one who acts, but one who acts specifically to bring life from where there is none. God is the God of the redemption.

It is fitting, therefore, that Eph 2 and Mk 2 are paired with this text. Eph 2 narrates the wonderful power of God in redeeming the nations (the gentiles) into God’s chosen people and Mk 2 shows Jesus reveal his power in healing a paralyzed man. This Gospel narrative poses a question, though, in the form of the scribes. For Jesus does not set out to heal in his initial response to the paralyzed person, but rather to forgive sins. This forgiveness, though, is unrecognized for what it is by the scribes. They say in their hearts that he blasphemes in this statement because only God can forgive sins. Thus, in the spirit of Isaiah 41, Jesus answers “so that all may see and know” by reversing the state of this paralyzed person. As the Isaiah passage states that the wilderness will become a pool of water, reversing its fundamental character, so this person who cannot walk will get up and walk. It is the power of God to make things other than what they are. To tear down dividing walls and unite (Eph 2), to redeem even the most unredeemable.

A lingering question: I have always wondered what it means in Psalm 18 when the Psalmist writes that God shows up as “perverse” (as the NRSV would have it) to the crooked. Perhaps another time I will explore the Hebrew nuance here and consider a bit more what this text might be saying about God. 

Cain's Anger, Cain's Grief

 

I ran across a small puzzle today when reading the first half of Gen 4. When Cain realizes that the LORD did not look with favor upon his offering of produce from the Earth, most English translations follow the Hebrew verb, a clear indication of anger, given the roots association with burning. Thus, the NRSVUE reads, “… so Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.” (4:6) The LXX, however, makes an interesting move in translating this text to Greek. Instead of communicating anger or burning (and thus destructive consumption, the LXX translator chose a verb communicating sadness: ἐλύπησεν. In fact, God’s warning that comes next in verse 6 exaggerates the sadness when God asks, “ἵνα τί περίλυπος ἐγενου”. Now, this exaggeration may be due to the modifier in v 5 (λίαν in the LXX) communicating that Cain became exceedingly saddened, but the choice of περίλυπος does a bit more work than simply exaggerating the emotional state. While λυπέω can have connotations of vexing, annoying, harassing, etc. and thus potentially inflaming, περίλυπος moves the semantic field away from these. Instead, it brings the semantic field into the realm of grief. 

    Now, it is not as if the LXX cannot translate this particular Hebrew verb into an appropriately angry semantic field. The next use of the verb in Hebrew comes in Gen 18 when Abraham questions God as to whether or not God would destroy Sodom should smaller and smaller numbers of righteous people be found there. Abraham politely and subserviently says to God, “Oh, do not let my Lord be angry if I speak…” (Gen 18:30, NRSVUE). The Hebrew verb is the same here as in Gen 4:5, but the LXX does not use λυπέω. Instead, the translator here chooses the appropriate ἀπόλλυμι, which carries with it the appropriate connotations of destruction. 

    Thus, we may ask why? Why does the LXX color Cain as saddened, grieved even, in discovering that God did not look with favor on his offering? And why, moreover, do the English translations ignore this divergence rather than acknowledge the difference in a footnote? My hunch on the latter is that the interpretive tradition that connects how Cain acts in the middle of the story (murdering his brother in a field) to his emotional state post-sacrificial discovery is so strong that the LXX here is simply nonsensical to us. Anger to murder makes sense. Deep grief to murder? That’s uncomfortable for us to consider. I invite you then, dear reader, to meditate with me today on the power of sadness and grief to move us to unthinkable acts as much if not more than anger. I also invite you to consider how you imagine God’s own emotional reaction to the crucifixion. Had not God offered something great that then humanity did not look upon with favor, in parallel to Cain’s offering to God? What is your instinct about God’s emotional state at the crucifixion: burning anger or deep grief?