Wednesday 2 February

Job 25:1-29:25

By this point, a lot of the commentaries on Job seem to suggest that he is overstepping the mark and straying into sinful self-justification.  I don’t know about that.  I guess it is possible that he is speaking a little too highly of himself, but maybe he is just being honest about his past commitment to right living.  I feel that somewhere along the line we, in the church, have become convinced that a Christian way of living is to put oneself down and focus on sinfulness and weakness .  And yet, in Job, it is the miserable comforters who are the pessimistic ones - “how can a man be righteous before God”, “man is but a maggot” - and Job who is optimistic about the possibility of communion between Creator and creation.  Surely Job is on the right side of the argument here?  Surely our role as co-heirs with Christ is to seek out the good in creation and to affirm it, to believe in the potential in people and to call it out.  It’s so tiring being around pessimists who never get beyond difficulties and problems.  Job inspires me that it is possible to experience the most gut-wrenching tragedies and still be optimistic about life.  He reminds me of the young Jewish ‘man of many sorrows’ who centuries later would still, despite his sufferings, find ways of drawing the best out of people and leading them into the life everlasting.

Matthew 21:33-22:14

Uh-oh, now he’s really gone and done it.  Jesus has gone and incited a bit of religious hatred and he’s going to spend the rest of his life as a severely marked man.  These parables were told specifically to and against those in front of him at that particular time and we have to be slightly careful about assuming they apply broadly in every context.  Jesus is announcing that he is the Son coming to his Father’s vineyard and that, when the religious leaders kill him there will be no option left to the Father other than to bring a wretched end to the age of the temple (the Romans sacked Jerusalem’s temple within 30 years and it was never properly re-instated).  The Father will then lease out the vineyard (understand by that the covenant blessings and call of God) to other tenants; Gentiles, tax-collectors and the like.  To the Jews of Jesus’ day this would have spoken directly into the brewing revolutionary sentiment - to overthrow of the corrupt rulers of God’s people - but in an unbelievably unpatriotic and perverse way - it was the Romans, not the Jewish rulers who should have been on the receiving end of God’s angry judgement.  So what does this say to us today?  Well I think the realisation that we (the non-Jews of us) are only in this thing at all due to the Father’s re-leasing of the Vineyard is sufficient food for thought.  But I think the sneaky little bit about wedding clothes at the back-end of the parable of the Wedding Banquet is also something that speaks directly across the ages; this new thing the God is doing is not an abandonment of the requirement for righteousness but, rather, is the offering of this opportunity to a far broader spectrum of people.  God calls us to declare his invitation to all and sundry but, in doing so, never to mistake his welcome as a watering down of his requirements.

Psalm 18:7-15

The Psalmist seems to be fairly obsessed with God’s nostrils!  Which is strange as all they normally do is sniff and sneeze every now and again.  But, this nasally-centred imagery doesn’t half convey a sense of his awesome power and instill within me a heightened sense of reverence.  This Consuming Fire who thunders from heaven is every bit the God that we still worship as Father and friend.  The sense of privilege of being able to approach one so intrinsically unapproachable is greater than I am able to verbalise.