Wednesday 19 February 2025

Psalm 77

Background
The Jewish listeners who first heard Jesus’ teaching would understand the word ‘heaven’ differently from us. Over the centuries, the popular conception of heaven has changed. In the Creation narratives the whole universe was spoken into being by God and held in being by God. ‘Heaven’ was where God is. Everywhere.

In the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)

Our intention in hallowing, honouring God’s name, is that as humans hearing God’s call, we embody God’s intentions for the ongoing care of creation. We do this day by day.

Within this context, in today's Bible passage, Jesus speaks of using our God-given energies to ‘treasure’ our true priorities. Our true treasure is built up by embodying kindness and working with God to care for the world.

Our true priority is to hear God’s guidance for action here and now.

As we all know, it can be easy to get distracted from our priorities and to lay up different treasure for ourselves. Status, power and wealth can make us feel rich in the sight of others and ourselves. But Jesus says if we put too much store on this type of treasure, we become vulnerable to the vagaries of chance. Moths can eat up our lovely clothes, rust can tarnish our precious metals, thieves can steal our savings. The equivalent today might be redundancies, stock market crashes and scams.

We can become addicted to status, power and wealth in various and often subtle ways. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God for our daily bread. Food is good. And yet yesterday we considered the benefits of periods of fasting from food. In a similar way, status, power and wealth are good, but we need to observe limits and boundaries, or we will find that love of these has become a substitute for our love of God. We risk depending on these rather than on God for our sense of identity.

Our hearts will become compromised. Such earthly treasure should not define others or ourselves. We already, always will have the status of beloved children of God. We are invited to grow into this and recognise it's enough.

To Ponder:

• What ‘spiritual’ practices have you built up to safeguard your potential addiction to thinking you need more status, power and wealth?
• Can you remember a time when you were bruised because something happened and you lost status, power and wealth? What happened to your relationship with God and how has it changed the way you regard status, power or wealth?
• How do you recognise or experience your treasure in heaven, here on earth?

Prayer
Loving God, everything we are and all we steward comes from you. Help us to focus on the priority of loving you with all our hearts, minds, soul and strength and loving our neighbour as ourselves. Amen.

Bible notes author: The Revd Jenny Ellis
Jenny is a supernumerary Methodist minister. She facilitates a mindfulness community based at her local surgery and also online. She also leads quiet days and contemplative study days. This year's series of online contemplative days entitled Beginnings will be based on the first three chapters of Genesis.