Fr Matthew Reese

I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the Lord, *
the maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved *
and he who watches over you will not fall asleep.
Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel *
shall neither slumber nor sleep;

—Psalm 121:1-4

Dear Friends,

I don’t know that we could find a more perfect encapsulation of our Christian hope this Passiontide than these lines from Psalm 121, appointed for Morning Prayer today.

Psalm 121 has obvious resonance with the experience of Jesus in the wilderness, as he fasts for forty days and overcomes all the assaults and temptations of the devil. When Satan brings Jesus up to a high mountain, and dares him to cast himself from the peak, he even has the audacity to quote scripture at Jesus:

As it is written in a very similar Psalm (91:11-12), “For he shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” (See Matthew 4:6; Luke 4:10-11).

But Jesus knows that God will not let his foot be moved. Jesus knows that He who keeps watch over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.

All over the world these coming weeks, faithful Christians will fall asleep in their own vigils. Surely some of us will also at Saint Philip’s. After all, the disciples themselves, even Peter, once fell asleep in their vigil with Jesus in the garden.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The road ahead to Easter is hard going. It requires something of us, not only spiritually, not only emotionally, but physically.

We will be confronted by the shocking brutality of Our Lord’s death, by the shocking callousness of his own people, who condemned him. Our backs will weary from sitting. Our knees will ache from kneeling. We will encounter again those verses of scripture, those lines of hymnody, that strike us at our very hearts.

Out of that magnificent window at Saint Philip’s we will quite literally lift up our eyes to the hills. We may wonder, fleetingly, where our help is to come.

But it is to come from God. It is to come from Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross. Thanks be to God for that.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew