Bible Study Guide for Sunday, November 19, Year A

● Judges 4:1-7 or Zephaniah 1:7,12-18
● Psalm 123 or Psalm 90:1-8(9-11)12
● 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
● Matthew 25:14-30

 

​All the readings are about doom and mortality. They are, every one,fundamentally eschatological–that is they are concerned with the doom of mortals, the judgment of souls and the culmination of God’s plan and creation. Despite being a very gloomy Christian I have often found the field of eschatology, or at least as it is often presented, a bit dull and occasionally pointless. My religious anxieties are many, but they are more often personal and existential rather than worrying about the end of the world.  It has always felt a bit silly and indulgent to worry about the end of days, we are all going to die anyways.  Whether we face death individually or all at once doesn’t particularly matter to me.  It would fundamentally change nothing, as death is still something that is happening to you.  Anyway, such an event would be so total and colossal that interest or disinterest, assent or protestation would be totally irrelevant. So, I would like to read these passages as being more personal.  Concerned with “An '' end not “The” end.  

If we read this week’s lessons though this lens, in particular Psalm 90, the Epistle and the Gospel, they become about being-towards-death -- a bit of Heideggerian jargon about how we can only have and authentic and honest outlook on our lives and reality when we take our deaths into account. At the end of today’s Psalm reading, the poet asks that God “teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” Knowing our days are numbered ought not to paralyze us, but rather make us define ourselves more radically and apply what wisdom God has blessed us with to what finite time we have.

​In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus implores us to use the gifts given to us for the glory and advancement of our heavenly Father so that we may enter His grace.  God created us, so all we are and have always been rightly His.  Properly speaking we are not owners but stewards of ourselves.  A lyric from the song “Right in Two” by the band Tool has always stuck with me: “Repugnant is the creature who would squander the ability to lift an eye to heaven conscious of his fleeting time here” and (while I am loathe to put it in here as Tool fans are widely accepted as odious by the majority of metalheads) I believe it to be very much in spirit with this reading.  Life is good, it is a gift and a blessing, but we should not let its essential goodness distract us from the giver of it. We ought to love God, for making us out of His abundant love and not be so enchanted by this wonderful, blessed, terrifying and often lonely life that we cannot seek our God.

​The most hopeful reading this week is the Epistle. Which begins as something of a rebuke to the wish at the end of the Psalm by pointing out the unknowability, and from our perspective randomness, of God’s appointed hour. But Paul uses this to urge us to be vigilant and to dare to be kind and build each other up.  This is absolutely the right impulse. At Trinity Church we are often given this Benediction, a quote by Henri-Frédéric Amiel: “Life is short. We don't have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.”  So let us keep our gaze fixed on heaven, be bold enough to love beyond all bounds, brazen enough to keep faith, and enduring that we may weigh ourselves with all the cares we can, and in God’s name be strengthened by them. Amen. — Ben Watts

 

Questions:

● What spurs you on to be more loving and kind?

● Is mortality part of the definition of man given that it seems to be in consequence of the fall?

● Is being concerned with the end of this age a waste of time, or does it have merit?