TODAY'S LECTIONARY readings in the Catholic church are dominated by it being The Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which are worth going into, especially as the Old Testament readings Isaiah 7:10-14; 8:10 and Psalm 40 and the Epistle reading Hebrews 10:4-10 emphasize what I have found is one of the most helpful of objects of meditation, the idea of us doing the will of God.
But I'm going to go back to Walter Brueggemann's extremely useful book, Gift and Task for this day which deals with Exodus 7:25-8:19, in which Pharaoh's magicians - his science-technology staff - were able to reproduce the effects that Moses and Aaron could but when he got to the third plague of the swarm of gnats, they were powerless, the head magician telling Pharaoh that "the finger of God" was in what Moses did. Exodus records that, like Trump and the Republican-fascists of today, Pharaoh didn't like the expert advice his own experts gave him so he chose to ignore it.
In the contest between God, the emancipator and Pharaoh, the lord of bondage, the first two episodes have ended in a draw. Matters are different in the third episode, concerning gnats. The Egyptian technicians, in the service of Pharaoh, "could not" match the performance of Moses and Aaron in the production of gnats. Pharaoh could not match the power of God. The predatory empire of Pharaoh, with all its technology had reached the limit of its capacity.
The news of that limit, whenever it is recognized, is a stumbling declaration, because it signifies that Pharaoh, symbol of every predatory power, does not need to be feared, does not need to be trusted, and so does not need to be obeyed.
The reading from the Gospel for that day is Mark 10:17-31
In a very different mode, Jesus' encounter with the man with "many possessions" makes a like point. The man presents a winning combination of qualities to Jesus. He is both obedient to the commandments and successful in the real world of economics, a most compelling dossier! Jesus' word to him, however, is that the combination of obedience and success is no passport to abiding well-being, because these points of merit have only limited currency.
We live in a world that pays endless tribute to the impressive combination of money, power, technical competence, and worldly wisdom . . . all important qualities. In both of these narratives, however, there is the uncompromising recognition that such capacities are limited. They cannot deliver well-being. They cannot prevent emancipation., We have a chance, with these stories, to sort out our proper commitments from our illusions about what or whom to trust.
I'm finding as I increasingly face the fact that every day is one day closer to death that what I've wanted in life isn't what would bring me real security. I've never much trusted in owning stuff, even having a home and work that pays (this Covid year has shown me how close to destitution that gets you) so it wasn't that issue with me. With me it was the desire to have a secure relationship with a man I could rely on. I found out how fragile that can be even with a very good partner a few years ago and he was probably as good as I'm ever going to have in this life. It hardly seems worth trying again. I have a niece who very suddenly and unexpectedly lost her husband this year, thirty years younger than I was when something similar happened to me. I've got a brother who lost his wonderful wife to cancer, a diagnosis that was made only two years into their marriage. Human relationships, what are close to the center of any healthy, worthwhile life are not the ultimate thing you can rely on, the most intensely personal of those relationships among the most fragile - look at the divorce rate.
The only really durable relationship is our relationship to God and it is one of the most difficult to find and think about. I wonder if that's what the long and difficult relationship between God and Moses is meant to point out. And Moses wasn't the only prophet who found it a difficult relationship, Jonah did and when Jesus was at the point of death he expressed a profound feeling of abandonment even by The Father who he constantly mentioned and expressed his relation to. I don't have any real answers as to how to get there, only that you shouldn't expect it to be easy. I have to constantly try to keep focused on it, I have no advice on that except to recommend trying and trying more than one thing, doing the will of God, being good to others, including our enemies one of the more important ways to do that and make it real in the world.
I would recommend Gift and Task as a means of not reading the entire Bible but a very large part of it as contained in the year 2 Episcopal lectionary that Brueggemann bases his book on. With his extremely fine meditations on some of the texts and his always useful prayer at the top to the page, it'll do more for you than any "read the Bible in a year" program I've looked at.
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