The wrong reading

Categories: forty-blogs-of-lent, holy-trinity-huddersfield

Tags: Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Huddersfield

Date: 18 February 2013 20:16:26

26 or 28

Forty blogs of Lent

Day 5

Holy Trinity Huddersfield, 17 February 2013

Today we had the wrong reading from the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 28:1-11 was read instead of Deuteronomy 26:1-11.Not that it  made a lot of difference, as the sermon was based on the Gospel reading, the account of Jesus temptation in the wilderness from the Gospel of Saint Luke. We learnt that in Milton's Paradise Regained. the sequel to Paradise Lost, the evnt round which Milton bases the return to paradise is not, as most Evangelical Christians would assume the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. No, it is the temptation  around which the poet weaves his narrative. I never knew that. We also learned that the temptations of Jesus were for him to do something for himself. To feed himself or to make a show of things, things that seem harmless in themselves, but would have had catastrophic consequnces on his ministry had he given in. So in the end the wrong reading didn't matter. What we were meant to hear were rules for what the Jews were to do after 40 years in the wilderness, instead we heard of the blessings of being obedient to God. Od that the wrong reading seemed apt to the theme of the service.