Tuesday in the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 2, 2022

Jeremiah 30, 1-2; 12-15; 18-22

The following message came to Jeremiah from the Lord: For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Write all the words I have spoken to you in a book.  For thus says the Lord: Incurable is your wound, grievous your bruise.  There is none to plead your cause, no remedy for your running sore, no healing for you. All your lovers have forgotten you, they do not seek you. I struck you as an enemy would strike, punished you cruelly.  Why cry out over your wound? Your pain is without relief. Because of your great guilt, your numerous sins, I have done this to you. 

Thus says the Lord: See! I will restore the tents of Jacob, his dwellings I will pity.  City shall be rebuilt upon hill, and palace restored as it was. From them will resound songs of praise, the laughter of happy men. I will make them not few, but many; they will not be tiny, for I will glorify them. His sons shall be as of old, his assembly before me shall stand firm.  I will punish all his oppressors. His leader shall be one of his own, and his rulers shall come from his kin. When I summon him, he shall approach me; how else should one take the deadly risk of approaching me? says the Lord. You shall be my people, and I will be your God.

I confused the Gospel readings of today and yesterday.  Today’s reflection is on today’s First Reading, which is from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.

The reading from Jeremiah is actually two distinct prophecies.  This is important to know because otherwise the reading is unintelligible: it switches abruptly from God rebuking the Kingdom of Judah for its sins of idolatry and injustice against the poor to God promising to restore Judah’s fortunes.  I have indicated the two prophecies with a space between them.

In the first of the two prophecies making up this reading, the Lord God almost sounds bitter towards .Judah: “Incurable is your wound, grievous your bruise.  There is none to plead your cause, no remedy for your running sore, no healing for you.”  These are the words of a heavenly Spouse who has been spurned and cast off.  By calling Judah’s wound “incurable”, God seems to say that she will always suffer from it.  We might note that the Hebrew word translated as “incurable” also has the meaning of “grievous” and “desperate”, but “incurable” is better because the wound’s effects were lasting.  Through Jeremiah, God tells Jerusalem, which has been destroyed by the Babylonians, that a turning point has been reached.  The people will not all be killed, for the “wound”, though “incurable” is not fatal, but the people will suffer ever after because of it.  “All your lovers have forgotten you, they do not seek you.”  This brings to mind Revelation 17, 1-2: “Come, I will show you the condemnation of the great harlot, who sits upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication. And they who inhabit the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her prostitution.”  This “harlot” in the Book of Revelation is also called “Babylon” in 18, 2: “Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great.”  We can thus compare Jerusalem and Babylon in terms of their dedication to idolatry and greed, and see how terribly the once holy city had sinned against God: it had made itself nothing more than a cesspool of immorality.  Therefore we must acknowledge that God, after many warnings to it, was just in its destruction: “I struck you as an enemy would strike, punished you cruelly.”  and yet, the city was not put to the sword, as frequently was done in ancient warfare.  “Why cry out over your wound? Your pain is without relief.”  Why cry out, for no one can help you, and no one cares.  “Because of your great guilt, your numerous sins, I have done this to you.”  That is, I have permitted this to be done to you.  We tend to forget that God owes us nothing.  We are so protected by him that when we do suffer harm, we cry out and wonder how God could do this to us.  God, who protects us though he does not owe this to us is furthermore under no obligation to save us from the consequences of our sinful or foolish actions.  For hundreds of years, he protected the kingdom from its enemies despite its offense, but at a point, the only way for a people to learn the truth about evil is to experience it.

“See! I will restore the tents of Jacob, his dwellings I will pity.  City shall be rebuilt upon hill, and palace restored as it was.”  This is a very different prophecy.  Perhaps after the death of Jeremiah a Jewish scholar was assembling his various prophecies into a single scroll and laid this one next to the fearsome one that comes before it, as a consolation to the reader.  The Lord God speaks of “Jacob” here, for Jacob lived in the southern part of the Promised Land, where the Kingdom of Judah would be one day.  The Lord speaks of his pity for his people and promises to make the land as it was before: “I will make them not few, but many; they will not be tiny, for I will glorify them. His sons shall be as of old, his assembly before me shall stand firm.”  “His sons”, that is, Jacob’s sons, his descendants.  “I will punish all his oppressors.”  Those who raise their hand against Judah will be cast down.  “His leader shall be one of his own, and his rulers shall come from his kin.”. Judah’s leader will come from the line of Jacob.  This assures the people that they will not be subject to foreign domination.  “When I summon him, he shall approach me; how else should one take the deadly risk of approaching me?”  In ancient times, the subject of a king — even if she were his wife — would have to obtain the king’s permission before approaching him at court (cf. Esther 4, 11).  (This may help us to understand John 6:37–38: “All who the Father gives to me shall come to me: and him that comes to me, I will not cast out” — Jesus, the good and gentle King).  “You shall be my people, and I will be your God.”  These words ring out like a plea again and again in the Old Testament.  They are fulfilled when his Son assumes a human nature so that we be made members of his Body — most truly becoming his people.

We can understand the first prophecy as showing the working of divine justice, by which we suffer a terrible wound by our sinning.  And the scar of this wound remains even after God’s Son washes it with his Blood.  Though our sins are forgiven, we have lost the merits we might have gained if we had chosen to cooperate with God’s will instead of rejecting it through our dallying with greed and the other vices.  But there will be a restoration, as we see in the second prophecy, and a new opportunity to do penance and live in harmony with Almighty God, the Spouse of our souls.