Weekly Liturgy booklets
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Notes on the Service for August 21st, 2022
Jer 1:4-10 • Ps 71:1-6 • Heb 12:18-29,22-29 • Lk 13:10-17 As we move through the prophets, we reach today the tormented Jeremiah, whose call came in 627 B.C., according to a verse omitted from today’s passage. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” means Providence intended Jeremiah to be a prophet; compare Ps 71's “from my mother’s womb you have been my strength.” “I am only a boy” seems to have been a convention of Israelite self-deprecation; besides Jeremiah, Solomon was also said to have used it at his inauguration. First Isaiah’s call featured a seraph’s cauterizing that prophet’s mouth with a coal; the Lord will put a scroll into Ezekiel’s mouth. Jeremiah’s mouth he simply touches.
Although it is not evident from today’s excerpt, Psalm 71 is the lament of an old man. The psalmist starts by quoting the first three verses of another psalm, Ps 31, and he then recalls the Lord’s mercy since his birth, (which is why it is appointed for use after the Jeremiah reading.) He will go on to recount his infirmity and disgrace, and to call on God for assistance in old age. We might imagine the woman in today’s Gospel praying Ps 71, and might imagine the synagogue crowd paraphrasing its vs 19, “you have done great things; who is like you, O God?” According to Hebrews, Zion invincible,“the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” is the true home of members of the New Covenant. If the members of the Old Covenant suffered dire penalties “blazing fire, dark gloom, tempest,” when they refused God’s mercy, then a fate even worse will meet those of the New Covenant, that is, Christians, if they should likewise refuse God’s even greater mercy in Christ. The quotation “yet once more will I shake...,” is from Haggai, a post-exilic prophet. Notice that in this passage the author uses a theory of the atonement different from his doctrine of Christ the Example which we noted last Sunday. Today he characterizes Christ as a victim, and says that Christ’s death has greater saving value than had the death of another righteous victim, Abel. For that supreme Victim, we are grateful. Hence we offer our awe-filled worship. Jesus demonstrates the true nature of Sabbath-keeping by freeing a wo-man who appears to have been suffering from what modern medicine would call kyphosis. When the synagogue president objects to practicing medicine on Saturday, Jesus retorts that even animals are unbound on the Sabbath, reinforcing his claim that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. It is unlikely that Luke would argue that human convenience takes priority over the Sabbath. Rev. Stephen Weissman Asheville, North Carolina Reprinted with permission.
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August 21st, 2022
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