"PUT NOT YOUR TRUST IN DECEITFUL WORDS."

Homily for July 26^th, 2014: Jeremiah 7:1-11.

          Israel’s prophets were called by God to do two things. They were to comfort the afflicted. But they were also to afflict the comfortable. Afflicting the comfortable is what we hear Jeremiah doing in today’s first reading. In Jeremiah’s day many of his people had lulled themselves into a false sense of security, trusting in what Jeremiah calls “deceitful words.” They assumed that because God was dwelling in their midst, in the Temple at Jerusalem, they had a guarantee against all harm. Jeremiah told them this was a grave error. God’s protection, he warned, depended on faithfulness to God’s law, written on the stone tablets which God had given to Moses, and enshrined in the Temple in the ark of the covenant.

          Jeremiah represents God saying to the people: “Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds … will I remain with you in this place, in the land I gave to your fathers long ago.” This the people had not done. Like so many of the prophets, Jeremiah denounces the violations of what we call today “social justice.” God’s protection depends, he says, on each person dealing justly with his neighbor, no longer oppressing the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow.

          Jeremiah also denounces the people for direct violations of God’s law: theft, murder, adultery, perjury, idolatry. Do you suppose, Jeremiah asks them, that you can do these things and then stand before the Lord in his earthly dwelling and say: “We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again”?

          Is that all just long ago and far away? Of course not. The prayers we pray, the sacraments we celebrate and receive, must bear fruit in daily life. If not, those prayers and sacraments are not only defective. They cry to heaven for vengeance. The Lord’s concluding warning, at the end of the first reading, is addressed also to us: “I see what is being done,” says the Lord.