First Reading · 2 Peter
Hastening a day you did not set
Where we are
Yesterday the lectionary read this letter's opening; today it reads its close, and skips everything in between. What lies in the gap is the polemic — the scoffers who ask where is the promise of his coming?, the flood as precedent, the day like a thief. Today's verses are what the author does with that argument once he has won it, and they are the last words of the letter.
What happens
Waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of Theos, on which the heavens will be dissolved in flames and the elements melted by fire. But according to his promise we await new heavens and a new earth in which right relationship dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace. And consider the patience of our master as rescue, as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him. Be on guard, then, not to be carried away by the error of the unprincipled and fall from your own stability. Grow in grace and in the recognition of our master and rescuer Jesus the Anointed. To him be glory now and to the day of eternity.
What to notice
Speudontas tēn parousian is the sentence that ought to stop a reader. Speudō used transitively means to hasten something, to make it come sooner — the same word Isaiah's Greek uses for hurrying a harvest. Some translators soften it to earnestly desiring, because the plain sense is theologically expensive: it makes the timetable of the last day depend, in some measure, on what its readers do. The letter has just spent a chapter explaining that the delay is deliberate patience, not wishing that any should perish. Now it turns and says the waiting is not passive. If the delay exists for the sake of people turning around, then the turning shortens the delay.
The elements are not what a modern reader hears. Stoicheia in this period means the basic constituents of the physical order — earth, air, fire, water in the popular philosophy, and in some usage the heavenly bodies that govern the calendar. The image is closer to Stoic ekpyrōsis, the periodic conflagration in which the cosmos returns to fire, than to any modern picture of the end. What 2 Peter does with the borrowed image is the interesting part: the Stoic cycle produces the same world over again, while here the fire is followed by something described only by its inhabitant. The new earth is not characterised by its geography but by its tenant — en hois dikaiosynē katoikei, a place where being in right relationship lives permanently.
And then a small sentence with a large history. Ho agapētos hēmōn adelphos Paulos — our beloved brother Paul — wrote to you, and in his letters there are some things dysnoēta, hard to understand, which the ignorant twist as they do the other scriptures. Two things are being reported at once. There is a body of Paul's letters circulating as a set and being read in churches that were not their original address; and it is being treated in the same breath as tas loipas graphas, the rest of the writings. This is the earliest surviving glimpse of a Pauline collection functioning as scripture, and the frame it arrives in is not triumphal — it is a warning that the letters are difficult and get misused.
The last imperative is a present tense. Auxanete — keep growing — in grace and in recognition. Set beside yesterday's perfect participle (everything has been granted), the letter's two ends make one shape: the gift is finished and the growth is not.
Responsorial Psalm
Moses at the arithmetic
Where we are
Psalm 90 opens Book IV of the Psalter and carries the only superscription in the collection that names Moses. Book IV is the Psalter's answer to the catastrophe at the end of Book III, where the covenant with David appears to have failed; its response is to go back past David to Moses and to the reign of Yahweh himself. This is where the Psalter starts over, and it starts by counting years.
The selected verses
Psalm 90:2. "Before the mountains were begotten and the earth and the world were brought forth, from everlasting to everlasting you are Theos."
Psalm 90:3-4. "You turn man back to dust, saying, 'Return, O children of men.' For a thousand years in your sight are as yesterday, now that it is past, or as a watch of the night."
Psalm 90:10. "Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong; and most of them are fruitless toil, for they pass quickly and we drift away."
Psalm 90:14+16. "Fill us at daybreak with your kindness, that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days. Let your work be seen by your servants and your glory by their children."
What to notice
Psalm 90:3 contains a pun the English cannot carry. Tashev enosh ad-dakka va-tomer shuvu benei-adam — you turn man back to crushing, and you say, "Turn back, children of Adam." The same root shuv does both jobs: the returning that is death, and the returning that is repentance. The psalm refuses to let the two be different words. Everything the tradition later says about turning around is standing on a verb that also means being ground down to dust, and Moses puts them in one sentence without explaining the relation.
The comparison in Psalm 90:4 is smaller than it is usually quoted as being. A thousand years are as yesterday when it is past — and then, having already made the point, the psalm makes it worse: or as a watch of the night, four hours, and the four hours you were asleep for at that. The scale collapses twice in one verse, and 2 Peter 3:8 quotes exactly this line back at the scoffers who are impatient with the delay.
Psalm 90:10 does something almost no ancient text does: it gives a number. Seventy years, eighty with strength. The word for what fills them is amal — toil that wears you out, the labour of Ecclesiastes — and the verb at the end, va-naupha, means we fly away, the flight of something too light to stay. And then the psalm, having counted, asks for the one thing that would change the arithmetic without lengthening it: sabbenu ba-boqer chasdekha, satisfy us in the morning with your covenant loyalty. Not more years. A different quality of morning.
Gospel · Mark
Whose image is on it
Where we are
This is the second of Mark's four temple confrontations, and the delegation is the strangest of them: Pharisees and Herodians together. They are natural enemies — one party formed around the law's application to daily life, the other around the client dynasty of Herod — and they have combined for one purpose, which Mark states outright: to trap him in speech.
What happens
They open with flattery: "Teacher, we know you are truthful and do not care what anyone thinks; you do not regard a person's status but teach the way of Theos in accordance with the truth." Then: "Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?" Knowing their hypocrisy, he says, "Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius to look at." They bring one. "Whose image and inscription is this?" They say, "Caesar's." He says, "Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to Theos what belongs to Theos." And they were utterly amazed at him.
What to notice
The trap is well built, and both jaws are lethal. The kēnsos is the Roman poll tax, imposed on Judea after 6 CE, and it was the specific grievance that had launched Judas the Galilean's revolt in the same year. Say pay it in the temple courtyard and the crowd hears collaboration. Say don't in front of Herodians and there is a capital charge waiting. The question is designed so that either answer is a conviction, which is why the flattery comes first: it is there to close the exit marked no comment.
He does not answer. He asks for a coin. And the request is itself the first move, because he has not got one. The denarius has to be produced by somebody else, and it is produced inside the temple precinct, and it is produced immediately — which tells the onlookers that the men objecting to Caesar's tax are carrying Caesar's money into the sanctuary without difficulty. The tribute penny of Tiberius reads TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AVGVSTVS: Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus. On the reverse, the emperor's mother seated as the goddess Pax. The coin is a small portable creed, and it was in someone's purse two courtyards from the holy place.
The two nouns are the hinge. Tinos hē eikōn hautē kai hē epigraphē? — whose eikōn, whose inscription? Eikōn is the word the Greek Genesis uses at Genesis 1:27: kat' eikona theou — Theos made humankind according to his image. Jesus asks the question about the coin and lets the audience finish the sentence about themselves. The coin carries Caesar's likeness and Caesar's name; give it back to him. The unasked second half is: and what carries Theos's likeness and Theos's name?
And the verb is a return, not a gift. Apodote — give back, render what is owed — not dote, simply give. Everything in the answer is restitution of property to its stamp. The saying has been used for two thousand years to divide life into two jurisdictions, but the grammar of it does not divide anything evenly: Caesar gets back a piece of metal with his face on it, and Theos gets back the person holding it.
Today's readings are all about provisional things and the stamp they carry.
Psalm 90 begins where nothing yet exists — before the mountains were begotten — and then counts. Its numbers are modest and unflattering: seventy years, mostly amal, exhausting labour, and then a flight. What the psalm asks for at the end is not more of them. It asks to be satisfied in the morning, which is to say early, in whatever span there is, with chesed — the loyalty that is not measured in years at all. Moses does the arithmetic honestly and then asks for something the arithmetic cannot supply.
2 Peter takes the same instinct and pushes it to the cosmos. Not only the seventy years but the stoicheia themselves are provisional; the sky is on the same list as the lifespan. And having said so, the letter refuses the obvious conclusion. It does not counsel detachment, and it does not counsel waiting. It says hastening — the one verb that makes the reader a participant in the timetable — and then, as if to prove the point is practical, it ends with three ordinary imperatives: be found spotless, be on guard, keep growing.
Then Mark hands the whole question to a silversmith. The denarius is the most provisional object in any of today's readings: a disc of metal that will outlast its owner and not outlast the empire that stamped it, currently claiming on its own face that a dead man was divine. Whose image is this? is a question about property, and the answer settles the tax in a sentence. But the word he chooses for image is the word Genesis uses for us, and once it is in the air, the second clause of the answer has no obvious limit. Caesar's coin goes back to Caesar because Caesar's face is on it. On the same principle, what goes back to Theos is not a portion of the estate. It is whatever bears the likeness.
A Question to Sit With
The saying about Caesar has been made into a boundary line, and it works badly as one: it sounds like an
instruction to divide
life into a public column and a private one and to keep the accounts separate. But the verb is
apodote, give back what is owed, and the criterion is not the sphere but the stamp. Caesar has a claim on his own metal. So the honest form of the question is not
where does the line fall between religion and everything else but
what has Theos's likeness on it, and am I returning that? Psalm 90 says the span is seventy years and mostly exhausting; 2 Peter says the sky itself is provisional. If both are right, then the one thing in my possession that is not provisional is the image — and
I am carrying it around like a coin, in a purse, into rooms where I would rather it not be noticed.