another Monday ramble
At 6:25 last evening, the day was closing with the sun having slipped away in a sunset that lasted barely long enough for me to grab my camera and snap a shot. From 7H porch, our sunsets and sunrises over St Andrews Bay seem most brilliant when there are clouds; and it's too hackneyed to say again that this is what life is like, sunrises and sunsets, clear skies, clouds and rain, but it's true, isn't it!
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The wars are too horrible to keep up with, maybe what stirs my nightmarish dreams of late, that continue, thrashing sleep again last night as nature's garbage man. You don't remember, but I certainly do, in the late 1930s and into the 1940s we lugged our garbage can from just outside the kitchen door, around the house, down the hill that was our front yard, to the end of the driveway where, the next day the city's garbage truck rolled by. It was a late 1920s or early 1930s stake truck with high stake sides, this was the South, remember, driven by a White man, two Black men hanging on at the rear to jump off every Time the truck paused, grab the garbage can, rip off the lid, dump the can upside down into the growing pile of garbage in the truck bed; and on to the next house.
That wasn't quite it, but close. Sometime along in maybe the late 1940s or early 1950s the city opened the alleyway easements and garbage collection shifted to the backyard instead of the front.
Up close, the garbage truck always carried a foul, sour smell; not unlike my now ancient age view of our Southern ways in that Time and place. Maybe not unlike the mess in my brain that's cleared out by foul dreams, eh? IDK. IDK nothin'
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Different things come to mind that distract me from my resolve to devote Monday's blogpost to something from the lectionary, our Bible reading list for Sundays, but I'm sticking with it this morning. The OT lesson for next Sunday is the story of Moses' untimely (to us humans who may not always share God's view of what's unfair) death. There's a Bible lesson in the story that maybe I'll get back to before this week is out and maybe you'll see there's an etiology involved, IDK.
For now, I'm intrigued with the second part of next Sunday's gospel reading from Matthew:
Matthew 22:34-46
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet”’?
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
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This comes up every three years, and I'm not sure why it always triggers me to comment. Matthew (also Luke 20:41-44) lifts this event from Mark 12:35-37:
The Question about David’s Son
Mark 12:35 While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? 36 David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared,
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet.”
37 “David himself calls him Lord, so how can he be his son?” And the large crowd was listening to him with delight.
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It's Jesus delighting the crowd by poking fun at the supposedly all-knowing Temple elders with a witticism. What's the basis? Psalm 110:1 reads (and it's also at Malachi 3:1), "Of David, a psalm. Said YHWH to my Lord, Sit here till I make your enemies a footstool."
Written by a courtier psalmist, the psalm is actually meant to flatter David the king by having God tell king David (the psalmist's Lord) to sit there while God makes David's enemies his footstool. When Jesus gets it, it's the Septuagint in which Kyrie says to Kyrie, and it's twisted so that instead of the ancient flattering court psalm in which God speaks to the king (lord), it's taken as the lord David speaking to his son the lord Messiah. Rationalize it any way you will, it's a nonsense riddle and everybody gets a chuckle.
Again, originally the psalm is not David speaking to his lord the Messiah (son of David), the psalm has God speaking to David. Reading the Hebrew it cannot be misunderstood, but reading the Septuagint Greek it gets twisted, just as in English, into a clever riddle.
Why the riddle anyway? Scholars aren't sure. Maybe there was disagreement among the learned Temple authorities about whether the long awaited and now imminently expected Messiah would be a human Son in David's line, or the divine Son of Man figure from Daniel 7. Maybe the Temple scribes had been arguing about that, and now Jesus and everybody was making fun of them.
We don't know. All I know is that the reading comes up every three years and I always like to stir it with my own spoon.
RSF&PTL
T88&c
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