Day 1 (Monday)
4 Kingdoms 19:1-37 (God Delivers Judah from Sennacherib’s Threat)
Last time, we met King Hezekiah, who reigned in Judah at the time of the fall of Israel to the Assyrian Empire. Hezekiah was righteous and faithful to the Lord beyond any king before or after him, according to our chronicler, and turned to the Lord in every circumstance. Assyria, however, is not content simply to demand tribute from Judah, however, but comes and demands that Jerusalem and all the surrounding country surrender, and accept the same relocation that came to Israel at this time. When we left off last time, the Assyrian general, the Rabshekah, was outside Jerusalem demanding that the people surrender themselves to Assyrian rule. As we read on, we will see what comes of this.
Hezekiah Consults Isaiah
19 When King Hezeki′ah heard it, he rent his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord. 2 And he sent Eli′akim, who was over the household, and Shebna the secretary, and the senior priests, covered with sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz. 3 They said to him, “Thus says Hezeki′ah, This day is a day of distress, of rebuke, and of disgrace; children have come to the birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth. 4 It may be that the Lord your God heard all the words of the Rab′shakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to mock the living God, and will rebuke the words which the Lord your God has heard; therefore lift up your prayer for the remnant that is left.”
5 When the servants of King Hezeki′ah came to Isaiah, 6 Isaiah said to them, “Say to your master, ‘Thus says the Lord: Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have reviled me. 7 Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’”
Sennacherib’s Threat
8 The Rab′shakeh returned, and found the king of Assyria fighting against Libnah; for he heard that the king had left Lachish. 9 And when the king heard concerning Tirha′kah king of Ethiopia, “Behold, he has set out to fight against you,” he sent messengers again to Hezeki′ah, saying, 10 “Thus shall you speak to Hezeki′ah king of Judah: ‘Do not let your God on whom you rely deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. 11 Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, destroying them utterly. And shall you be delivered? 12 Have the gods of the nations delivered them, the nations which my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Tel-assar? 13 Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharva′im, the king of Hena, or the king of Ivvah?’”
Hezekiah’s Prayer
14 Hezeki′ah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and Hezeki′ah went up to the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord. 15 And Hezeki′ah prayed before the Lord, and said: “O Lord the God of Israel, who art enthroned above the cherubim, thou art the God, thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; thou hast made heaven and earth. 16 Incline thy ear, O Lord, and hear; open thy eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennach′erib, which he has sent to mock the living God. 17 Of a truth, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands, 18 and have cast their gods into the fire; for they were no gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone; therefore they were destroyed. 19 So now, O Lord our God, save us, I beseech thee, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou, O Lord, art God alone.”
20 Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezeki′ah, saying, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Your prayer to me about Sennach′erib king of Assyria I have heard. 21 This is the word that the Lord has spoken concerning him:
“She despises you, she scorns you—
the virgin daughter of Zion;
she wags her head behind you—
the daughter of Jerusalem.
22 “Whom have you mocked and reviled?
Against whom have you raised your voice
and haughtily lifted your eyes?
Against the Holy One of Israel!
23 By your messengers you have mocked the Lord,
and you have said, ‘With my many chariots
I have gone up the heights of the mountains,
to the far recesses of Lebanon;
I felled its tallest cedars,
its choicest cypresses;
I entered its farthest retreat,
its densest forest.
24 I dug wells
and drank foreign waters,
and I dried up with the sole of my foot
all the streams of Egypt.’25 “Have you not heard
that I determined it long ago?
I planned from days of old
what now I bring to pass,
that you should turn fortified cities
into heaps of ruins,
26 while their inhabitants, shorn of strength,
are dismayed and confounded,
and have become like plants of the field,
and like tender grass,
like grass on the housetops;
blighted before it is grown?27 “But I know your sitting down
and your going out and coming in,
and your raging against me.
28 Because you have raged against me
and your arrogance has come into my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
and my bit in your mouth,
and I will turn you back on the way
by which you came.
29 “And this shall be the sign for you: this year you shall eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs of the same; then in the third year sow, and reap, and plant vineyards, and eat their fruit. 30 And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward; 31 for out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord will do this.
32 “Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. 33 By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, says the Lord. 34 For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
Sennacherib’s Defeat and Death
35 And that night the angel of the Lord went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. 36 Then Sennach′erib king of Assyria departed, and went home, and dwelt at Nin′eveh. 37 And as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adram′melech and Share′zer, his sons, slew him with the sword, and escaped into the land of Ar′arat. And Esarhad′don his son reigned in his stead.
Reading 14 – 1146 words
Discussion questions:
1) What did you notice in today’s reading? What surprised you or what was memorable to you? (The Leader should note a few helpful explanatory points. Last time we saw the Assyrian king Sennacherib campaigning in Judah, and sending three high officials with a detachment to threaten Jerusalem and attempt to reduce it without a siege. When that fails, hearing that the king of Ethiopia has marched against him, he sends another threatening letter, probably because he wants to wrap up his campaign in Judah quickly in order to turn his attention to this threat from beyond Egypt. But the answer of the Lord to those threats is the death of a great many of Sennacherib’s soldiers, which forces him to lift the siege and depart. This siege, and its surprising end without the conquest of Jerusalem, is again independently corroborated by Assyrian records, although they attribute it to the payment of a large tribute by Hezekiah. Herodotus wrote of this event that the reason for the lifting of the siege was that the Assyrian army was overrun by mice, which modern scholars have suggested might mean plague. Regardless of the explanations provided by those outside the household of faith, Jerusalem was not destroyed by the Assyrians, despite their fearsome reputation, and the prophetic writers of 4 Kingdoms attribute this deliverance to the Lord, just as He promised in His word spoken through Isaiah the prophet. Finally, as a matter simply of fun, it is worth noting that there is a famous poem from the 1800’s written describing this event; we include a link to this here: https://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/the-destruction-of-sennacherib/)
2) Where do we see Christ in this text; what is He saying or doing here?
3) Do we see ourselves and the Church in this text; what does it say about us?
4) What do you find difficult about this reading? Is there anything confusing about it, or anything that you dislike? (This is an open question, as always. )
5) Does this reading make you think that you need to change anything in your life?
Day 2 (Wednesday)
Gregory the Theologian – On Theology and the Office of Bishops – 2
Last time we began a new sermon of St. Gregory the Theologian, talking about the work of theology and the role of the bishop in the Church. St. Gregory began by urging anyone undertaking to speak about God to begin with purification and repentance, and to approach in humility…but still to approach, taking Zacchaeus as a model and guide. This time, having laid his groundwork of preparation, St. Gregory will proceed with his argument.
ORATION 20 – On theology and the office of bishops – Part 2
5. Now that we have cleansed our theologian with our sermon,18 come, let us talk a little about God too, drawing our inspiration from the Father himself and the Son and the Holy Spirit who form the topic of our sermon. I pray that I may be like Solomon and avoid eccentricity in what I think and say about God. For when he says, For I am the most simple of all men, and there is not in me the wisdom of men,19 he presumably does not mean that he is guilty of a lack of discernment. How could he?
Did he not, after all, ask God for this understanding above everything else20 and obtain wisdom and insight and largeness of mind in richer and greater abundance than the grains of sand?21 How does one so wise and blessed with such a gift call himself the most simple of all men? Clearly, because his understanding is not his own but the fullness of God’s understanding working in him. This is also why, when Paul said, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,22 he of course was not speaking of himself as dead, but meant rather that he had attained a life beyond the ordinary by partaking of the true life, the one bounded by no death.
Hence we worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, distinguishing their individual characteristics while maintaining their divine unity; and we neither confound the three into one, thus avoiding the plague of Sabellius, nor adopt the insanity of Arius and divide them into three entities that are unnaturally estranged from one another. Why must we violently swing in the opposite direction, attempting to correct one distortion with another, much as one might try to straighten a plant that leans completely to one side, when we can, by moving directly to the center, stay within piety’s pale?
6. Now when I speak of the center I am talking about truth, the only object worthy of our consideration as we reject both the evil of contraction and the greater absurdity of division. We ought not, on the assumption that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same, adopt language that from a fear of polytheism contracts its reference to a single individually existing entity, keeping the names but stripping them of any distinction; we may just as well call all three one as say that each by definition is nothing, for they would hardly be what they are if they were interchangeable with one another.
Nor, on the other hand, ought we divide them into three substances that are either foreign, dissimilar, and unrelated (which is to follow what is well called the insanity of Arius), or lack order and authority and are, so to speak, rival gods. In the first instance we are locked into the narrow position of the Jews, who restrict deity only to the ungenerated; in the second, we plunge into the equal but opposite evil of positing three individual sources and three gods, something even more absurd than the first case.
We must neither be so partial to the Father that we actually strip him of his fatherhood, for whose father would he in fact be if his son were different in nature and estranged from him along with the rest of creation? Nor, by the same token, should we be so partial to Christ that we fail to preserve this very distinction, his Sonhood, for whose son would he in fact be if there were no causal relationship between his Father and himself?
Nor again should we diminish the Father’s status as source, proper to him as Father and generator, since he would be the source of small and worthless things were he not the cause of deity contemplated in Son and Spirit. It is our duty then both to maintain the oneness of God and to confess three individual entities, or Persons, each with his distinctive property.
7. The oneness of God would, in my view, be maintained if both Son and Spirit are causally related to him alone without being merged or fused into him and if they all share one and the same divine movement and purpose, if I may so phrase it, and are identical in essence. And the three individually existing entities will be maintained if we do not think of them as fusing or dissolving or mingling, lest those with an excessive devotion to unity end up destroying the whole.
And the individual properties will be maintained if, in the case of the Father, we think and speak of him as being both source and without source (I use the term in the sense of causal agent, fount, and eternal light); and, in the case of the Son, we do not think of him as without source but the source of all things. But when I speak of “source,” do not think of time or imagine something midway between Creator and created, or by a false interposition split the nature of beings that are coeternal and conjoined.
For if time were older than the Son, it would clearly be the first product of the Father’s causal activity, and how can one who is in time be the creator of all time? And in what sense is he in fact the Lord of all23 if he is preceded by and subject to the lordship of time? The Father, then, is without source: his existence is derived neither from outside nor from within himself. In turn, the Son is not without source if you understand “Father” to mean causal agent, since the Father is the source of the Son as causal agent, but if you take source in the temporal sense, he too is without source because the Lord of all time does not owe his source to time.
Gregory Nazianzus, Select Orations, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Martha Vinson, vol. 107, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 107–116.
Reading 2 – 985 words
Footnotes:
18 There is a play on words between theologian (θεολόγος) and sermon (λόγος).
19 Prv 30:2 LXX.
20 1 Kgs 3:9–14.
21 1 Kgs 4:29 (LXX 2:35a and 5:9).
22 Gal 2:20.
23 Rom 10:12.
Discussion questions:
1) What did you notice in today’s reading? What surprised you or what was memorable to you? (The Leader should point out how St. Gregory is effectively providing his listeners with a basic explanation of the essential theology of the Holy Trinity, of how it is that we must speak about God, based upon what He has revealed to us of Himself. It is important for us here to remember that St. Gregory is preaching this in a strongly majority Arian city, as Constantinople was at the time, and is working hard to avoid requiring his listeners to use any particular term which might be controversial and might therefore push them away from the truth of the Orthodox Faith. He is, as I understand it, something of a minority report in this matter; he is determined to be as conciliatory as possible, and is therefore not using the term Homoousios (consubstantial/of the same Essence), or at least not yet. But he still clearly holds to the essential truth of Nicaea, the essential truth that the Church has held from the beginning, and what he is doing is EXPLAINING what Homoousios means, while carefully avoiding turning his listeners away by using the term. This therefore serves us as a beautiful summary of the Trinitarian Faith of the Church.)
2) Where do we see Christ in this text; what is He saying or doing here?
3) Do we see ourselves and the Church in this text; what does it say about us?
4) What do you find difficult about this reading? Is there anything confusing about it, or anything that you dislike? (This is an open question, as always. )
5) Does this reading make you think that you need to change anything in your life?
Day 3 (Friday)
Acts 26:19-32 (Paul Tells of his Preaching, Urges Agrippa to Believe)
Last time we saw St. Paul giving an account of his life to King Agrippa (Herod Agrippa II), bringing the king up to the point in his life that the Lord appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Effectively, although Agrippa is simply consulting with Festus about an administrative curiosity (this Roman citizen who is also a Jew, but is hated by the leaders in Jerusalem, who has therefore appealed to Caesar, without any clear charges being laid against him), Paul is making use of the opportunity to preach Christ to one of the most important and powerful men in the region. This gives us an insight, as well, to what Paul would have intended to do when he met Caesar himself; to preach Christ to him! We will see how he continues, then, from the point of his encounter with Christ.
Paul Tells of His Preaching
19 “After that, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, 20 but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and do deeds consistent with repentance. 21 For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. 22 To this day I have had help from God, and so I stand here, testifying to both small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would take place: 23 that the Messiah must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.”
Paul Appeals to Agrippa to Believe
24 While he was making this defense, Festus exclaimed, “You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane!” 25 But Paul said, “I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth. 26 Indeed the king knows about these things, and to him I speak freely; for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this was not done in a corner. 27 King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.” 28 Agrippa said to Paul, “Are you so quickly persuading me to become a Christian?” 29 Paul replied, “Whether quickly or not, I pray to God that not only you but also all who are listening to me today might become such as I am—except for these chains.”
30 Then the king got up, and with him the governor and Bernice and those who had been seated with them; 31 and as they were leaving, they said to one another, “This man is doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment.” 32 Agrippa said to Festus, “This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to the emperor.”
Reading 48 – 343 words
Discussion questions:
1) What did you notice in today’s reading? What surprised you or what was memorable to you? (The Leader should point out that Agrippa here, almost like Herod Antipas, his uncle, who had arrested John the Baptist and then ordered him executed, has an interest and understanding of the things of which Paul is speaking. Perhaps even more so than Herod Antipas, he seems drawn to Paul’s preaching, although he too declines to actually submit himself and follow Christ. But Paul does not hesitate to preach to him; on the contrary, he praises him for his understanding. But Agrippa gets up and leaves at this point; St. Paul remains only a curiosity to him, and he recedes into history.)
2) Where do we see Christ in this text; what is He saying or doing here?
3) Do we see ourselves and the Church in this text; what does it say about us?
4) What do you find difficult about this reading? Is there anything confusing about it, or anything that you dislike? (This is an open question, as always. )
5) Does this reading make you think that you need to change anything in your life?