Homily for July 26th, 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.
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