Morning Devotion for Lent
Friday, April 8, 2022
The Invitatory
Rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
Amen.
The Lord is full of compassion and mercy: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Exodus 9:27-35
Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron, and said to them, “This time I have sinned; the Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong. Pray to the Lord! Enough of God’s thunder and hail! I will let you go; you need stay no longer.” Moses said to him, “As soon as I have gone out of the city, I will stretch out my hands to the Lord; the thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, so that you may know that the earth is the Lord’s. But as for you and your officials, I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God.” (Now the flax and the barley were ruined, for the barley was in the ear and the flax was in bud. But the wheat and the spelt were not ruined, for they are late in coming up.) So Moses left Pharaoh, went out of the city, and stretched out his hands to the Lord; then the thunder and the hail ceased, and the rain no longer poured down on the earth. But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned once more and hardened his heart, he and his officials. So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he would not let the Israelites go, just as the Lord had spoken through Moses.
Meditation – Michael Palmisano
Throughout the successive plagues upon Egypt the following pattern emerges: God sends a plague upon Egypt, Pharaoh repents of his sins, Moses calls off said plague, and then Pharaoh returns to his old ways of “sinning.” Each time Pharaoh’s repentance is unturned, we are told in refrain that Pharaoh has once again “hardened his heart.” From this poetic phrasing, we get a sense that the inward, fleshy, and feeling part of Pharaoh’s self has been hardened to cold, lifeless stone. Clearly his power over Egypt is far too vast for empathy to find room in his heart.
The understanding of Pharaoh’s hardening of heart is inverted for us readers at the conclusion of the final plague when, by proper translation of the original Hebrew, we are told that “The Lord will harden Pharaoh’s heart and the Lord will be honored through Pharaoh…” (Exodus 14:4). What could this mean? How can we comprehend God’s apparent forcing of Pharaoh’s coldness and sinfulness? Might we even be shocked to discover that the Hebrew word for “hardened” and “honored” are of the same root? Through this poetry, we discover that Pharaoh had only ever been an instrument of the Lord’s own honoring of Himself – a sad, kingly collateral to the salvation of Israel and the righteousness of God.
Are there any figures of history who are truly outside the scope of God’s forgiveness? What do we make of the Pharaohs, the Judas’, and other “villainous” men and women of history? Is there anyone who can escape God’s merciful embrace? The biblical narrative recounts many stories of God’s mercy, justice, and forgiveness which leave us with a conflicting sense of who God is. However, when all these stories are read through the lens of the crucifixion and the resurrection, a cohesive image of God arises. The crucifixion and resurrection leave us with this admonition: we ought to be very careful with our keeping score of mankind’s “good” and “evil” acts.
If we want to assert that the Pharaohs and Judas’ of history are proverbially “cut off” from God’s mercy, then we also must be ready to explain how these individuals have not merely become counterfeit Messiahs for the One who bears the sins of the world. If these sinful individuals are to bear some sort of eternal weight of condemnation to legitimize God’s righteousness, then wouldn’t they merely be taking on the sins of the world, so that others might be saved in contradistinction to them? Perhaps the most frightening result of our accepting a sense of God’s comprehensive and total “mercy” is that we are called to that same standard of forgiveness. If God could indeed forgive Pharaoh and Judas, then who might we be called to forgive today?
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.
