March 18th 2020: Psalm 1

You can read the text of today’s reading here:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+1&version=NLT

The text of this reading is pretty straightforward: if you want to be blessed, for life to be as it should be and to receive all that life has for you, all that God has for you, even, delight in the law of the Lord. It goes well for people who do, and it doesn’t go well for people who don’t. They are ‘the wicked’ (in the traditional, rather than modern sense). Most of us don’t want to be ‘the wicked’. We’d rather be the ‘good’. So, there’s a pretty big question: if we’re to delight in the law of the Lord and think, meditate on it day and night, what is that law?

People have been confused about this forever. Even the disciples of Jesus, the people who were closest to him and learned from him and did their utmost to follow what he asked them to do needed help working it all out, as we find it Matthew’s gospel,

“³⁶“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.””

So, isn’t this timely? In a moment in world history where we could choose to be only about ourselves and seek safety and security for us and our families, avoiding the consequences of Covid-19, we are told that every single one of the many (and if you don’t know how many there are, there really are many, many) laws and details of how people that want to delight in the law of God and know what it is to be truly free have to follow is this one: Love. Love for God, recognising that we need God, that we can’t do life on our own. Love for self, casting aside the words that have hurt us and put us down over the years, the actions of others and the actions and thoughts of ourselves which make us think that everyone else is great but we’re not worth love; that kind of love. And love for our neighbour. I often ask kids in school, ‘who is your neighbour’? And they sometimes say, ‘Mr Smith’ or ‘Mrs Jones lives across the road’. More often than not, though, they’ve got it much better than most of us adults. They say ‘everyone is my neighbour’. The whole community is our neighbours. Obviously love means different things in different relationships, but we have to show love to everyone, we have to value everyone as if they were the most precious person on the whole of the planet, and we have to let them do the same to us. If we do that, and if we have God at the centre of it all, then we’ll be going some way towards delighting in the law of the Lord, being like a tree planted in streams of living water, one which bears the best kind of fruit. Don’t you want to be like that? I do.

Something to Pray About

Pray for those who are working hard in hospitals caring for the sick, for those in isolation at home with sick relatives, worried about who might catch the virus next. Pray for those in laboratories working hard and unseen on behalf of all, that God would guide their hard work and give them wisdom.

Something To Do

Check in with your neighbours. Say hi. Ask about their day and how they are. If they say ‘fine’, ask again until they tell you the real story. Get to know their story. Be brave enough to listen and brave enough to share your story.

Haydon

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

If you’re a Christian, and you have been for any length of time, you’ll probably know this passage. It’s one of Paul’s most famous ‘explanations’ of the insufficiency of the Old Testament Law for salvation. I use inverted commas because his explanation is closely-argued and takes some teasing out. It’s a rich banquet of hope which reveals more and more tender morsels of delight with each fresh reading. This is definitely not a passage to skim read once and move on!

As I reflect on it today, the challenge it presents to me is this: I’ve been freed from the demands of the Old Testament law, because they were fulfilled by Jesus. I’ve been freed, made new, made alive, by the Spirit of God, which dwells within me. All things are possible with God. All things are permissible, even as many things are not helpful for me, for all people.

So, I need to stop living as if there is any other law but love. I do not benefit from exchanging one crippling law code, the one of the Old Testament, for another, the weight of expectation I place on myself and allow others to place on me. In fact I suffer. Grievously. So, more to the point, do those around me. Even more to the point, this was never, as far as I can see, God’s intention. Freedom is freedom. Freedom with caveats or constraints is no kind of freedom at all, it is the exchange of one set of barriers for another. That’s the point of the good news Jesus came to tell and to live out for us. Every barrier between God and man is now broken down. We might try and build them up again to make ourselves more comfortable – after all, most of us like to, actually, give control to others, most of us are used to and prefer to carry an element of caution in the way we live, which quickly morphs into fear and anxiety if given the chance. Freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom, is….freedom. Jesus did not die and rise that we might seek to enslave ourselves again.If our approaches to faith, the way our Churches or faith communities function, force us into a way of being and existing which stipulates the possibility of condemnation, we have missed the point. Where the spirit of the Lord, there is freedom.

Of course, we are to live responsibly in the way we love God, others and ourselves. We’re to make good use of the gifts we are given in seeking to serve others, build others up, building the kingdom of God. By no means do we have carte blanche to live just as we please to the detriment of anyone else. We are freed for lives of joyful obedience. Obedience to the law of love, to live the way of the master, the way of the cross, the way that leads to life, the way that glorifies God.