Word to the Wise
Thursday, August 19, 2010 - Thursday in the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
[Ezekiel 36:23-28 and Matthew 22:1-14]For I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all the foreign lands, and bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities, and from all our idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts. I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes, careful to observe my decrees. You shall live in the land I gave your ancestors; you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
Ezekiel is trying to instill hope in a people who have been exiled from their land and, to some extent, from their faith! He is speaking on behalf of God who promises a new covenant. One must read much of what he has condemned earlier in their conduct to understand the importance of this promise. He spares no one in his critique! The exile itself was disaster enough, but Ezekiel makes it clear that moral and religious disaster had occurred long before the exile. The exile was simply the result of that moral and religious disaster! The particular circumstances and faith of the Jewish people in the Bible allowed for a special role for prophets. The fact that the words of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and others were preserved is an indication of the importance of that role. It accounts for the way in which people reacted to John the Baptist and to Jesus! Our own times make it difficult for such a formal role to develop. On the secular level in our country, we tend to look to figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, etc. as having a special role in the development of the American experience. Perhaps a figure like Martin Luther King, Jr. and his leadership in the civil rights movement or Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador could be close to what the biblical prophets symbolized. The biblical prophets called the people to account for their departures from faith to idolatry and their injustice to the more vulnerable members of the society. Our own times could use more figures like them. The question is whether or not we would pay any more attention than the ancient ones did! AMEN
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