Matthew 5, Psalm 5; Genesis 13-15.
Psalm 5 introduces us to a very, very important word in the Hebrew scriptures. It's usually translated into English by the word "steadfast love;" or you may remember it from the older KJV, where it was translated "lovingkindness." The Hebrew word is hesed. It is the kind of love that characterizes God better, perhaps, than any other word.
Psalm 5:7 reads:
But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house,
I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you.
Jesus (we will note as we read the Gospels) quotes 5:9 when he is seeking words to describe the empty hypocrisy of some of his opponents:
There is no truth in their mouths;
their hearts are destruction;
Their throats are open graves;
they flatter with their tongues.
Then the psalmist prays that God will "spread" protection and "cover" the righteous "with favor as with a shield." I am reminded of an evening hymn from my childhood. I think it has Swedish roots: "Thy holy wings, dear Savior, spread gently over me."
Genesis 13-15
13:4 To "call on the name of the LORD" is a biblical way of saying that Abram prayed, gave his allegiance to the God who had called him on his journey.
13:10 gives us a hint of what will follow; and also reminds us that in their earliest form, hearers knew the stories of Genesis before they read the scroll of the Book of Genesis. I suspect that perhaps nobody until the 19th or 20th century read the Bible for new information. These were well known and beloved stories.
13:14 Although Lot had apparently taken the more productive land, God promises to Abram: "...all the land that you see i will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust tof the earth, your offspring can also be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you"
13:18 Abram's response is to build an altar to the LORD.
By the way, the convention of the text of most English Bibles is that when you see LORD in all capital letters, the text is not shouting like a flaming email, but telling us that LORD is translating the unutterably holy name of the God of Israel, normally represented in Hebrew by the 4 consonants: "Y," "H," "W," and "H." This combination of letters is sometimes known by its Greek term, the tetragrammaton, which means "four letters."
Genesis 14: Lot and Abram have separated geographically, but they are still allied, so when the kings of the small city states made war, and Lot was caught in the middle, Abram and his people wade in to help them. Note the reference to "BITUMEN pits" in 14:10. The oil extracted from the tar sands in Alberta is bitumen: extra sticky and thick. It's been known in some forms for millenia.
Also note, in 14:14, the size of Abram's household. These were whole communities that were moving around and negotiating territory for grazing and planting with the peoples who already lived there.
14:17ff Enjoy the strangeness and mystery of the story of Melchizedek. We'll see this character employed typologically when we get to the Letter to the Hebrews near the end of the New Testament.
Note how Abram gives a tenth of "everything" (14:20); and how Melchizedek blesses Abram by "God most High."
15:1ff This is the very, very important chapter where God makes (literally in Hebrew "cuts") a covenant with Abram. The covenant was a sort of agreement well known in the Ancient Near East, generally made between a ruler and his vassals. God takes the initiative.
Abram has begun to worry about how God is going to keep his promise to make him the father of descendants that will be as hard to count as grains of dust, or as stars in the sky.
(Interesting! We who live in an age of electric lights don't usually get the sense of how vast and many the stars of heaven are. The dust image, living in Minot, I totally get, however!)
15:12-16 The hearers of this passage know that it took generations, centuries, in fact, for the Israelites to settle in the Promised Land.
15:18-21 The definition of the bounds of the land that God gives Abram are traditional: "From the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates;" and the names of the peoples then inhabiting the land are also traditional, and you will see that list or a close approximation all over the Torah (the first 5 books of the Old Testament).
Matthew 5: I've kept this till last because it is a chapter from which we have recently been reading our Gospel lessons at the Sunday Eucharist. It's the beginning of what is called the Sermon on the Mount; and in a stylized way it packs a whole bunch of the teachings of Jesus into three chapters, in ways that would have made the early Jewish hearers of Matthew's Gospel think of the words of Moses as he received the Law (the Torah) from the LORD.
5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill." Let's watch how Matthew uses the concept of "fulfilling" the Law and the prophets in his Gospel. It's a key idea!
God's law is best fulfilled by those who are seeking with their whole heart to respond in love to God's love. Somebody has talked about how there must be a transformation from "the love of the Law to living under the Law of Love." Hmmm.... maybe... Jesus continues to demand of his hearers a deeper-than-the-letter-of-the-law understanding of how God communicates expectations through the Law.
"You have heard it said....but I say to you"--- and Jesus gives a more severe/more thoroughgoing interpretation.
Finally, moving perhaps to the hardest of all the things he says: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (5:44)
The Christian ideas of nonviolent resistance to persecution have their seeds in 5:38-42. Many commentators have explained how to follow Jesus' instructions would create a kind of street theatre that would make the perpetrators' unjust actions apparent to all, and that would demand of the persecuted person a kind of confidence in one's own divinely-imputed dignity that would be truly transformative.
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