WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19 Psalm 72 Genesis 42:18-28 1 Corinthians 5:6-6:8 Mark 4:1-20 Opening the Bible, if we’re determined to let it speak to us, will often mean entertaining the prickly question of how we might go about being doers, actual players, in the movement of God’s good work in the world, as opposed to mere hearers, passive recipients, big talkers, or worse, fakers. What do we have to do to be true? Today’s readings wrestle with this question directly and indirectly but always with the demand of a certain lived ethic of social righteousness in sight Psalm 72 is a prayer for the king, likely Solomon, and it takes many an expected turn in its petitions that there would be abundant grain, gold, and that the king’s enemies would find themselves licking the dust. But in a subversive twist, it also places before the king a behavioral expectation that, when neglected, will render all conventional signs of kingly thriving negligible. A just king, as the prayer has it, is one who will defend the poor, deliver the needy when they call and redeem their lives from oppression and violence (12-14). While Solomon fell woefully short of this archetype, the biblical tradition preserved it, and the demand sits in front of us as we read and listen. The burden of listening well, what Jack Kerouac expressed in his hope that he might be “a great rememberer, redeeming life from darkness,” appears to be the pinch we’re right to feel in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower. “Listen!” he begins his story about listening, and he goes on to insinuate that, when it comes to the movement he announces and invites all hearers into, most don’t and won’t (Mark 4:3-9). Anxieties, the lure of wealth and all manner of misdirected desire will all too often prevent the cultivation, within our lives, of God’s righteousness. Years later, the difficult work of actually living lives of “sincerity and truth” in the minute particulars of the everyday is chronicled further in Paul’s letter to the beleaguered and befuddled, trying-to-be-a-new-creation community of Corinth (6:8). Their status as alleged believers in the good news of God’s kingdom is generally belied by their practical conduct (lawsuits and bodily degradation) toward one another. But the demand, then and now, for the visible embodiment of God’s gracious love in the lives of those who claim, celebrate, confess and depend upon it remains the same, signaling still over the centuries. May we be revived and invigorated to undertake it ourselves, yet again, this Lenten season. DAVID DARK Assistant Professor, School of Religion
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