Word to the Wise
Tuesday, July 12, 2022 - Tuesday in the 15th Week in Ordinary Time
[Isa 7:1-9 and Matt 11:20-24]Unless your faith is firm you shall not be firm! [Isaiah]
There is a lot of biblical geography in the two scriptures assigned for today's Mass and it would be easy to lose the message in the middle of it all. The message is a call to faith, as the last line of the first scripture from Isaiah proclaims and quoted above. The "Northern Kingdom" [also known as Ephraim] has entered an alliance with Assyria [Damascus] against Judah [where Jerusalem is located]. Isaiah tells the King of Judah to stand firm against the alliance and put his faith in God [and not in alliances with others]. "Unless your faith is firm you shall not be firm." Eventually the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians, as Isaiah prophesied. But, Judah itself would eventually fall to the Babylonians because of their own failures in faith and go into exile.
Jesus warns various towns in Galilee that unless they repent and believe in the message of the kingdom of God, they will come to disaster. There is some frustration in his warnings, reflecting the opposition he was experiencing. Earlier in this chapter his ministry was contrasted with that of John the Baptist, but neither the fire and brimstone style of John nor the reconciling message of repentance of Jesus seemed to be successful at times. The account may reflect some of the experiences of the earliest Christian missionaries.
Geography and politics will not protect a nation from destruction when faith is not firm. Recent incidents in our own country have shown that faith in political personalities can lead to erosion in fundamental principles that have sustained the nation. The call to repentance for failures to live up to the moral teachings of our faith is often met with a "that was then, this is now" attitude. The call to repentance and conversion is the same and our collective resistance to Jesus' call will mean the same fate as those towns in Galilee. AMEN