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Exclusively published to the Touchstone website each week, these Daily Reflections are brief commentaries on the lectionary readings contained in the St. James Daily Devotional Guide. The reflections are penned by Patrick Henry Reardon, editor of the Daily Devotional Guide and a senior editor of Touchstone. Father Reardon provides here a very brief directional clue for one of the readings each day. Long-time readers of the Daily Devotional Guide will find these reflections an additional help to their reading of Holy Scripture which they can print and keep with their Guide. The Daily Reflections will be updated weekly. Easter Sunday, March 31 Matthew 28:1-10: A gentleman opens the door for ladies. So does an angel. In today’s gospel reading the door he opens is the entrance of a tomb, and the angel opens it, not to let Jesus out (for He is already gone), but to permit the myrrh-bearing women to enter. Like Good Friday (Matthew 27:51,54), this is a day of earthquakes. As the paschal ladies approach the empty sepulcher, says the text, there was a "great earthquake" – seismos megas. Nor is the earth the only thing to quake this day, for a great seismic agitation grabs hold also of the soldiers who guard the tomb. "For they quaked (eseisthesan), Matthew tells us (28:4). As for the women, they are the first to behold the risen Jesus, and the first to hear His greeting of the Resurrection peace (28:9). Easter Monday, April 1 Jonah 3: Jonah’s message, requiring less than half of verse 4, is the shortest sermon on record. It is a simple prediction of Nineveh’s downfall. Jonah makes no reference to God, nor does he even suggest the possibility of repentance. Speaking to "a people of strange speech and of an hard language" (Ezechiel 3:5), he keeps the message short and bitter. If we were to rely solely on the ratio of effort to results, we should calculate that Jonah was easily the most successful prophet in all of Holy Scripture. It is a great irony that other prophets preached sermons that fill dozens of biblical chapters and scores of biblical pages without seeing more than a fraction of the fruit that Jonah gathered with his bare half-verse. There is the further irony that Jonah’s entire prophecy, which foretold Nineveh’s destruction in forty days, was not fulfilled. So he was the most successful prophet by being the least accurate! These are two of the ironies that abound in this very ironical book. One should also note that this forty-days fast of the Ninevites was the first recorded Lent of the Gentiles. Easter Tuesday, April 2 Luke 24:13-35: These 23 verses are of both exegetical and liturgical importance. First, the risen Christ, as He walked with the two disciples and interpreted the Holy Scriptures, laid the foundation for the proper Christian exegesis of the Bible. The "spiritual sense" of God’s holy Word is that Word’s referential relationship to the Christ who brings it to fulfillment. Clothed in the literary forms of history, parable, and poetry, the Bible’s deeper doctrinal message is ever its reference to Christ, who is at once God’s only path to us and our only path to God. In this sense we may say that all of Christian doctrine is rooted in our Lord’s discourse to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus. Second, in the Sunday experience of those two disciples we have the initial paradigm of the only proper Sunday worship as all believers knew it for most centuries of Christian history. Their experience of hearing and understanding God’s Word, while their hearts burned within them, led to their recognition of Him in the breaking of the Bread. This intricate combination of Word and Sacrament were always understood to be the proper birthright of Christian Sunday worship. Wednesday, April 3 Ezechiel 1: The Book of Ezechiel is constructed of four parts: (1) Chapters 1-24, which contain stories, visions, and prophecies in which God judges sinful Israel. These are to be dated prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587. (2) Chapters 25-32, in which divine judgment is pronounced against the other sinful nations of the same period. (3) Chapters 33-39, which contain prophecies given after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587. These prophecies are related to Israel’s eventual deliverance and restoration. (4) Chapters 40-48, which contain Ezechiel’s visions of the new temple to be built in Jerusalem. Chapter 1 describes Ezechiel’s call to be a prophet. In the second half of summer Ezechiel received his inaugural call by the banks of the Kabari Canal, a man-made waterway that flowed out of the Euphrates, through the city of Babylon, and then back to its mother river. This "fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin" is calculated to be the period between April 30 of the year 593 and April 18, of the year 592. The "fifth day of the fourth month" of this year was August 4, 593. Like the inaugural callings of Moses (Exodus 3:1-4) and Isaiah (6:1-6), the calling of Ezechiel is glorious and visionary. Above the "four living creatures" who support the vault of heaven, he sees "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord." God’s glory, because it fills all of heaven and earth, can be revealed anywhere, whether in a burning bush in the Sinai peninsula, or in the temple at Jerusalem, or, as now, by the banks of a waterway in Babylonia. Thursday, April 4 Ezechiel 2: After his inaugural vision in Chapter 1, Ezechiel now formally receives his call in Chapter 2. The Spirit (in Hebrew Ruach), of which Ezechiel spoke in 1:4 (where the same Hebrew word is usually translated as "Wind"), now enters into him, causing him to stand up. This is the same Ruach that will enliven the dry bones in Chapter 37. It will be another six years before Jerusalem will be destroyed, and the exiles, to whom he is sent to preach, are rebellious. Ezechiel is exhorted not to be impressed by them, nor necessarily to expect positive fruits from his preaching. In terms very reminiscent of the calls of Moses and Jeremiah, Ezechiel is instructed to continue preaching to his contemporaries, no matter how they receive his word. It is God’s word, after all, that he will speak. Toward the end of this chapter he will be handed a scroll of God’s word, which he is instructed to eat. Friday, April 5 Ezechiel 3: The point of eating the scroll was that the prophet should internalize God’s message, assimilating it into his own being, so that he could speak God’s word as his own (cf. Revelation 10:8-11). It remains one of the great images of prophetic inspiration: "All my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart." This great vision is then followed by seven days of reflection (vv. 15f), at the end of which Ezechiel is made aware of his new vocation as a watchman for God’s people. Whether they heed him or not, the watchman has a divinely commissioned responsibility to give proper waning. This theme will return in Chapter 33. Saturday, April 6 Ezechiel 4: Here begins a sequence of symbolic actions that Ezechiel is commanded to perform, as though in pantomime, to serve as efficacious signs to his brethren in the Captivity. These actions function as prophecies too, prophecies conveyed in sign language as it were. The first of these, a sort of symbolic enactment of the siege of Jerusalem, involves Ezechiel playing like a child with building blocks, placing the various pieces into an elaborate scene, accompanied by a narrative. Children do this kind of game all the time. A solitary child, indeed, may spend hours at it, telling himself the story as he moves the little pieces around. The second action, more abstract, symbolizes the punishment of Israel and Judah, the former destroyed in 722 and the latter to be destroyed in the near future. The prophet’s third action portrays the suffering of the siege about to come upon Jerusalem. Most significant to this prophetic priest is the ritual uncleanness that must accompany the preparation of the food and the circumstances of the people’s defeat. In the few words that Ezechiel himself speaks in this chapter, we observe the intense emotional pain felt by the prophet in the enactment of these symbolic gestures.
For the Daily Reflections archives, please return to the current page. Copyright © 2002 by the Fellowship of St. James. All rights reserved. |
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