S U N D A Y
Love Justice: Week 14 of Ordinary Time
I apologize for sending today’s newsletter later than usual. We’ve been leaning into Sabbath rest this Labor Day weekend. Thank you for your patience!
We’re more than one-third of the way through Ordinary Time! For these seven weeks, following Bobby Gross’ excellent outline for Ordinary Time, we’ll consider a cycle of God’s love that alternates between permission to love ourselves and the imperative to love our neighbor. This week we are contemplating what it means to love our minds as we love ourselves.
Sunday’s scripture
Jeremiah 15:15-21; Psalm 26; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:21-27
In Living the Christian Year, Bobby Gross assigns the theme of justice to this week in Ordinary Time. While the passages in today’s lectionary (Year A) don’t speak about justice as explicitly as vast portions of the rest of the Bible, for example, Amos 5 included in the readings we’ll consider during the rest of the week, I love reading today’s lectionary through the lens of biblical justice. When we do, we see the rhythms of God-breathed, Christ-embodied, Holy Spirit-empowered biblical justice. We see God’s work of vindication and deliverance and our wholehearted, embodied response of worship. In this way, justice takes the posture of the cross.
This is the cruciform pattern of God’s kingdom.
In the post below, I’ve recorded myself reading the introduction to a chapter in my book entitled “Cruciform Love.” In a later part of the chapter, not included below, I encourage us to keep Paul’s poem in 1 Corinthians 13 as the backdrop for all of our understanding of what it means to live in the shadow of Jesus’s cross.
There are no shortcuts around suffering on the spacious path, but there is always companionship. In a poem about agape love, the Apostle Paul helps us imagine the kind of love Jesus invites in Luke 10—the kind of love that costs everything…If we believe this to be true (and I do), then we understand that we can’t “virtue signal” cruciform love; we must be transformed by faithful, embodied agape love.
—Tamara Hill Murphy, The Spacious Path
Today’s song from The Porter’s Gate helps us imagine the shape of biblical justice in the most concrete way possible. The matter of justice is met in the earthy stuff of wood and nails, hands and feet, crucifixion, and resurrection.
To be honest, I spent about three hours meditating on various images of Jesus and the cross before recognizing the heart of what I perceive in today’s Scripture passages. Out of all the vast treasury of artists’ renderings of Christ and the cross, it was an image of Emmanuel Garibay’s Jesus holding a cup of coffee with his nail-scarred hand that captured my imagination today. I hope you’ll appreciate it, too.
