Proper 16 Year A
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A
Description
Twelve Months of Sundays – Year A
Ordinary Time
Proper 16
Exodus 1.8—2.10
Romans 12.1–8
Matthew 16.13–20
How do slaves get free? By living the present in the light of the future. The midwives, and Moses’ mother, act out of defiant hope. Moses, destined to lead Israel through the Red Sea, begins his own life being snatched from a watery grave. Future freedom rushes into present slavery and transforms it.
Screwtape pointed out to Wormwood that effective tempters don’t put things into people’s heads; they keep things out. Learn to think straight, urges Paul, about where you are in God’s purpose, what time it is, what role you have in Christ’s one body. Straight thinking isn’t a matter of unaided reason. Here in Romans it is about the mind’s transformation: the slave mentality of the present age is to be abandoned
in favour of the freedom of God’s children, who, knowing themselves to belong to the new age that has come to birth with the Messiah, learn to live in the present in the light of that future...
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A by N T Wright
Published by SPCK