Reflections on this morning's lectionary readings:
Judges 11.29-end
Luke 17.1-10
In some ways Morning Prayer is like tuning instruments prior to performing. It is important that the different instruments are in tune with each other, if they are to play together. Our vocation is to go about our business "playing" with the Creator or, indeed, to go about God's business (seeking his kingdom) in our daily work.
We want to perform the piece of music written by our Creator and conducted by his Son and we want to play it in tune with his Spirit. It turns out that it can make a big difference whether we ask God to be in tune with us or submit our tuning to his lead.
Did God want to deliver Israel from the Ammonites? It certainly looks like it. Would his Spirit have come upon Jephthah if it were otherwise? Jephthah could have prayed, "Lord, if you want to deliver Israel from the Ammonites, I am ready to be your instrument." Instead he prayed, "If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me..." Big mistake. Jephthah's agenda and God's were to all intents and purposes the same but Jephthah looked at it as God's agenda matching his rather than the other way round.
Once you have tuned the instruments, this is how you have to play. Jephthah's daughter acquiesces which means that in our society we could dress up her death as "assisted suicide" thinking of it as a "good death". (We don't have a category for her other reaction, bewailing her "virginity", because she clearly did not mourn the lack of sexual experience as such, which could have been remedied during two months in the mountains, but the fact that her life would come to an end in her father's house before she would be set up in a new house.)
The disciples are a little like Jephthah in that they assume that if they are given more (faith), they can achieve more - or so it seems to me. Jesus lampoons this idea with the ridiculous image of a mustard-seed-sized faith re-planting a mulberry tree in the sea. The question is not whether you can achieve marvellous things for God but whether you're about God's business which usually takes the form of quietly doing what needs to be done, "We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done."
If that had been Jephthah's attitude, it would have been a different story, wouldn't it?
