Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
July 26, 2015
| Reading 1: | Reading 2: | Reading 3: | Reading 4: |
| 2 Samuel 11:1-15 | 2 Kings 4:42-44 | Ephesians 3:14-21 | John 6:1-21 |
Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
The reading from 2 Samuel is the famous story of David and Bathsheba. One day, David is looking down from his balcony and sees a naked woman bathing. He meets her and soon enough, they sleep together. As sufficient time elapses, she, Bathsheba, informs him that she is pregnant!!
The story describes David (and Bathsheba) as rather frantic about trying to hide the fact that David is the father from her husband Uriah the Hittite and everybody else. So, we have what might be the first attempted cover up in history!!!
Uriah is ordered home (per David’s orders), David is hoping that Uriah will sleep with Bathsheba, thus not leaving any questions about paternity. But, Uriah, a very faithful convert, does not live up to the king’s expectations: he wants to share the lives and sufferings of his king and fellow soldiers. He does not have sex with his wife.
One can sense David’s exasperation and desperation. He orders Uriah to be put on the frontline so as to get him killed, which is what happens. In effect, to cover his paternity of Bathsheba’s child, David sets Uriah up for murder.
David comes off as an incredibly unsavory character, to put it mildly, a real jerk!! There other stories in which he is no less a jerk! He sins, and then always returns to the Lord God. One almost gets tired of him—we feel like saying, “There he goes again!”
And that is the point : no matter what, God is always with us, feeling our joys and sorrow, with us when we pursue peace and justice but also when we are the ones who inflict the hurt and the pain. God is even with jerks like David.
True to the prophetic pattern, the Psalm begins with a lament that is voice of judgment for departing from the ways of God. In a tone of exaggeration, the Psalm maintains that all are guilty yet ends on a note of promise, of forgiveness and restoration of all.
The way in which this reading is placed is meant to foreshadow the Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Gospel. Both accounts are about feeding, ostensibly not having enough yet winding up with more than enough.
This Psalm is very congenial to process thought. All of God’s works—creation itself, the universe—give thanks to. God is ever present and gives strength (“cum forte”) to the weak.
I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit,3:17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.Paul is praying that we may be strengthened in our very being so the Christ who is the incarnation of God may be in our hearts, that we may incarnate Christ in our own way, in our finitude, rooted in love. The image of the mid-wife comes to mind. We are called to be mid-wives, helping give birth to the creative transformation that is the work of Christ.
This week, we switch from Mark to John for the Gospel reading. John is quite different from Mark and the other Synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke. In the Synoptics, Jesus comes proclaiming the Commonwealth of God, which is near but “not yet” fulfilled. In other words, there is a tension between the “already, “the present, and the “not yet” of the future.
Not so in John. There is no Messianic secret—we know who Jesus is from beginning to end: he is in the incarnate word. He tells he is the “Bread of Life.” There is no tension between present and future; everything is present.
We come to the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only sign and wonder described in all four gospels. The story is familiar; there is not enough food for the crowd, but after Jesus blesses it and asks that it be distributed, there is not only more than enough but there are leftovers. There narrative is meant to be connected to the Eucharist and its pattern: Jesus takes the loaves, blesses, them and has them distributed.
One option for preachers is to draw on this connection and how in the Eucharist (however it is understood in our respective traditions) we are fed by God’s love. And we are called to feed others. This can be elaborated upon in the manner of last week’s commentary, in the sense of sharing one another’s lives, taking the world around us into ourselves. At this point, the feeding in the Old Testament lesson as well as the Epistle can be tied together with the Gospel.
The Gospel also invites us to reflect on the more complicated issues of domestic and global hunger. What is the responsibility of Christians? It all seems so complicated; we might feel like giving up. How do we stay energized? How do we simlify our lives/ How do we live with less so that others may live/ How do we stirve for just patterns of food distirbution?
I have heard some eloquent sermons from a liberal Protestant perspective that have claimed that real miracle in the Feeding of the Five Thousand is the miracle of sharing. When we share—whether it be food, joys or sorrows—scarcity becomes plenty. There is enough for leftovers.