Tuesday of Week 25 in Ordinary TIme
It can be fun to peek at the verses the lectionary leaves out:
Ezra 6:11 "Furthermore I decree that if anyone alters this edict, a beam shall be pulled out of the house of the perpetrator, who then shall be impaled on it. The house shall be made a dunghill."
Biblical Jenga…mean and spiteful Jenga! Why hide this stuff? It is really good! With a nuanced and incarnational understanding of Sacred Scripture, we can see how the unfolding story of a people, made in the image and likeness of the Creator, is struggling to know and understand just who this God is. God isn't changing from a brute to a nice guy. Rather, we are slowly unmaking God in our own image as we begin to allow this wholly other God to inhabit our hearts and minds. (...the text is living and so it is still working on us) And so texts like these are great mirrors. Darius IS the good guy…comparatively speaking. He is facilitating the building of the Temple and for Israel, that is a restoration of a people. Soon Israel will be cleansed and rededicated to the covenant. The missing verse actually serves the "building" motif well.
Anyone who has been through a parish merger knows how constitutive buildings are to a people's identity. Jesus gets radical here. He loves buildings too. As a boy the Temple is where he began "being about my father's business." But it is the occupants who matter most. Those who hear the word of God and do it…they are family, church, people. They matter most.
I pray in thanksgiving for the people who have set in me a firm foundation
I pray in thanksgiving for the blood, sweat, and tears that built the beautiful as icons of the God who draws, and houses, and protects
I pray in thanksgiving for the people of God who put life into the beautiful
Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord (Psalm 122)
No comments:
Post a Comment