Readings

A few minutes ago we prayed “Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.” It turns out that asking how God answers this prayer is a useful entry into our readings.

Our first reading comes from that part of the Book of Isaiah that assumes the people exiled in Babylon. The glad good news: God is about to set the people free to return to their land. But, as today’s text makes clear, the people after decades of Babylonian captivity doubt both God’s power and God’s will to save them.

God’s power: Isaiah seeks to rekindled their imaginations. The scale and splendor of the heavens: that’s all the work of our God, putting on a show every night that would have left Cecil B. DeMille bright green with envy. This God will have no trouble bringing Israel home. Well, today too much light pollution to see what Isaiah’s audience was able to see every night. But we have the work of the physicists, whose attention to the fine tuning of our universe so that there is—Isaiah’s words—”a tent to live in,” leads some to conclude that the only way to avoid acknowledging the Creator is to posit an infinite number of universes, we being in the happy position of living in the one in which life is possible.

God’s will to save: Isaiah will focus on that in the following chapters.

Meanwhile, toward the end:

He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

How does Isaiah describe those who respond appropriately? “Those who wait for the Lord.” That’s interesting: after celebrating God’s power at work now, what is there to wait for? To extend Isaiah’s language, we could contrast God as Creator and God as Savior, the God whose blessing sustains this fertile world, the God whose saving puts things right. And there’s waiting in both: the farmer waits for the rain; the people (here) wait for release.

“Wait for the Lord” here is pretty much hope in the Lord. And it’s that hope as much as anything that gives the power the text celebrates. In the pony rides in my childhood, the ponies always picked up the pace once the stables were in sight. And hope plays no small part in the NFL games we’ve been watching through the season.

Today’s psalm: it overlaps to a fair degree with Isaiah. Noteworthy here is the last full verse we read:

But the Lord has pleasure in those who fear him, *
in those who await his gracious favor.

Here the psalmist pairs fearing the Lord (“fear” often shorthand for our proper stance vis à vis God) and waiting for God’s action.

Returning to our collect, in Isaiah and the psalm, God setting us free, giving us liberty, may be first about awakening our hope. That’s not all it is, but for Isaiah’s audience that’s where it had to start.

Today’s Gospel: it’s part three of Mark’s portrait of that long day in Capernaum: calling the disciples, teaching and exorcising in the synagogue, healing Peter’s mother-in-law, caring for the crowd that assembled around the house at Sabbath’s end, snatching time for prayer before heading off. After our earlier readings—and in the text itself—there’s joy: all that waiting has not been in vain.

At the same time, notice the disconnect Mark’s pointing of the camera represents. Isaiah pointed us to the heavens, but here we’re in a corner of Roman-infested Galilee. The psalm’s focus was on Jerusalem, and here we’re very far from Jerusalem. (The Jerusalemites had about the same opinion of Galilee as New Yorkers have of the Midwest.) It would have been so easy to write off anything happening in Galilee. And that’s the tricky part about hope. Hope can go bad if it clutches its idea of how fulfillment should happen too tightly.

God setting us free, giving us liberty: it’s also about allowing for surprise, the fulfillment of our hopes in ways we didn’t expect. That was the tragedy of many of the Pharisees: they had hope in spades. But when it was fulfilled: “Give us Barabbas.”

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians looks like the odd man out. He’s still working that meat offered to idols question, now using his own conduct as an example. There were many ways of being what we might call an influencer. You could charge high prices for your services and hang with the beautiful people like the sophists. You could drool down your beard and leave no social convention unbroken like the cynics. What are Paul the Pharisee’s choices?

There’s no direct line from any of the other readings to Paul. But if we pull back the camera a little…

The same Isaiah who pictured God in majesty above the celestial court gave us this:

²⁴ You have not bought me sweet cane with money,
or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices.
But you have burdened me with your sins;
you have wearied me with your iniquities. (Isa. 43:24)

³ Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb;
⁴ even to your old age I am he,
even when you turn gray I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save. (Isa. 46:3-4)

And of that same Jesus, the sovereign protagonist in today’s reading, Paul will write in Philippians:

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. (Phil. 2:6-7a)

God does power and authority not by insisting on privilege, but by—in our language—moving way outside God’s comfort zone. And that’s Paul’s model: “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.”

God setting us free, giving us liberty: for Paul, it’s about freedom to act divinely, moving outside his comfort zone for the sake of others. And that’s, of course, the conduct he’s encouraging his hearers to adopt. That’s how Paul’s hope expresses itself, not in the anxious defense of his privileges (immaculate Hebrew pedigree, Roman citizen, advanced studies), but moving outside his comfort zone to stand in solidarity with all for whom Christ died.

“Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life…” What’s the answer to that prayer look like? From today’s lessons: that journey from Babylon to Jerusalem, or, in the words of our Eucharistic Prayer, “bring us to that heavenly country.” That’s the endgame. Meanwhile, as with Isaiah’s audience, it’s about awakening hope, so that when freedom comes we won’t be too busy distracting ourselves to notice. Set us free with a hope that doesn’t betray us by locking God into a script so narrow that no surprise is possible (the temptation of the Pharisees). Set us free to express our hope not in clinging to privilege, but, with Paul, in moving outside our comfort zone.