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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.

Monday, October 5, 2015

5 October 2015


It is hard to imagine a king determining to put up altars of worship in the house of the Lord, the temple, to worship other gods and burn his own son as sacrifice, but that is exactly what Manasseh had done in his long (fifty five years!) tenure as king.  Why would the Lord allow this man to reign that long when he was so wicked?  The ways of the Lord are truly inscrutable.  Our author says, “Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel.”  His divine forbearance with not only the king but the nation is, on one hand, remarkable and on the other hand I want to ask, why not stop this madness?  He is indeed patient with us and yet that patience is not forever.  Judgment is announced and the tools are the measuring line of Samaria, the northern kingdom which is no more, and the plumb line of Ahab, the most wicked king in the history of that other kingdom. The judgment will be unlike anything the world has seen and it will result in the complete annihilation of the city, as a person wipes a dish clean.  Sometimes the only way to move ahead is to destroy that which is, it is too broken to repair.

In both Mark and Luke we hear of one demon-possessed man in this story.  We presume they tell of only one because his condition was worse than the other. It is further presumed that Matthew’s sensibilities are Jewish and that he would be concerned with the law that requires two witnesses to establish a thing, either positively or negatively, so he includes both in his telling of the story.  The disciples were all there so more than one witness would have been there but not for those in the country of the Gadarenes after Jesus and the disciples left.  It would not have been unusual for men to have been isolated from society when the society judged them to be a danger, similar to what we do with certain mental patients today. That Jesus took this little excursion to heal these men tells us of His extraordinary compassion for even those who were not covenant people.  While God’s intervention sometimes waits as it did with Manasseh, sometimes He breaks in to our situations in ways and times we could never have imagined as Jesus does here with these men.

Paul warns the Corinthians against participation in feasts where the elements of the feast have been sacrificed to idols.  Such participation is worship, recognition that these things are gods of some sort.  We cannot participate in such things without being tainted by them.  We have to refrain from such participation in order to witness that we believe in one God alone and that anything else that receives worship is a demon.  Angels, throughout the Bible, refuse to accept worship so anything that does accept it is not of God. Paul is clear that his words apply to things we know are sacrificed to idols.  We have no responsibility to sort out the provenance of things but if we are told that they have been sacrificed to idols then it is a witness to decline to eat.  My liberty to eat is circumscribed in order that no one misunderstand my faith.  We can’t send mixed messages about the oneness of God. 


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