Word to the Wise
Thursday, February 8, 2018 - Thursday in the 5th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Kgs 11:4-13 and Mark 7:24-30]When Solomon was old his wives had turned his heart to strange gods, and his heart was not entirely with the Lord, his God, as the heart of his father David had been......So the Lord said to Solomon:"Since this is what you want, and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes which I enjoined on you, I will deprive you of the kingdom and give it to your servant. I will not do this during your lifetime, however, for the sake of your father David; it is your son whom I will deprive. Nor will I take away the whole kingdom. I will leave your son one tribe for the sake of my servant David and of Jerusalem, which I have chosen."
The great kingdom of David, with its central shrine - the temple - would be united for less than 100 years. Solomon, David's son by Bathsheba, nearly bankrupted the kingdom in building the temple. By the time he was old, he had weakened in his faith and built other temples to foreign deities. His son, Rehoboam showed none of the wisdom that Solomon had been famous for, and the result was a rebellion which divided David's kingdom. This division would make it easy pickings for the big powers such as Assyria and Babylon. The author(s) of the historical books of Samuel and Kings attributed all of this to a failure to keep the covenant and remain faithful to God.
It is tempting to attribute political and natural disasters to punishment by God for unfaithfulness to the commandments. One must be careful about this kind of thinking. At the same time, our cultural fabric and moral foundations in our country is interwoven with religious faith. When secular concerns alone rule the day, human weakness has little to control it. One will hear such statements, "I did nothing illegal," while the conduct in question is clearly immoral and corrupt and the legislation that made this possible was constructed along lines that make the conduct possible. The separation of Church and State in our land can create two different moral systems and lead to corrupt practices. If even Solomon in all his wisdom could be corrupted, and the great Roman empire crumble from within, perhaps we should pay attention to the importance of putting God first. AMEN