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The intent of Pilgrim Processing is to provide commentary on the Daily Lectionary from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The format for the comment is Old Testament Lesson first, Gospel, and Epistle with a portion of one of the Psalms for the day as a prayer at the end.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

23 March 2013




The promise is that they will be numerous and prosperous, He will "sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast."  They will multiply and their flocks and herds will increase.  Not only, however, will they prosper, there is something more important announced.  They will not only have the written Law, they will have the Law written on their hearts.  Their desire will be to do the Law, it will no longer be an external thing, it will be who they are.  We need a change of heart in order to desire the good.  Our hearts are indeed corrupt and unable to do God's will, our desires are too great and we live too often at the level of the gratification of those desires.  What needs to change is that we need to see properly in order to desire properly.  We need to see the kingdom as the pearl of great price, that thing which is desired above all else.  That is the promise here.

Yes, He must have loved Lazarus but that doesn’t mean Jesus is immune to their criticism.  Surely, they say, He could have prevented this death, why does He now weep when He failed to come when we called Him.  Sounds like some of my prayers.  Yes, He could certainly have prevented this death but they have no faith at all now that He can do anything.  They don't want to roll away the stone, as the King James version says, "he stinketh."  Decay has set in, there is nothing left which can be brought back to life, but Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the grave and behold, the man.  We, likewise, were dead and now that life is within us.  Do we realize that or do we think He saved us from dying?  Grace is more amazing if we realize that we were already dead and restored to new life than if we simply allowed Him to be our rescuer.

Mercy is the way we all get in.  No one gets in on merit.  Paul says there is a "partial hardening" of the Jews in this time but that will be changed, the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, there is no rejection of the Jews.  That mercy is meant to change us, to cause us to see that the old way was the way of death and the new creation (2 Cor. 5) is intended to have a new set of desires, the desires of life.  In our liturgy the most common term for God refers to the quality of mercy.  In more recent Prayer Books and in the church we have replaced that expression of God's character which also points to us as "miserable offenders" with "no health in us" with some vague sense that God has done something for us because we just needed His assistance to get over the hump, that He simply lowered His standards a bit.  That change leads to less extravagant praise and worship.  We need to be made new and not simply accepted.

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