Wednesday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 29, 2020

The Feast Day of St. Martha

Jeremiah 15:10, 16-21

Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth! a man of strife and contention to all the land! I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me. When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart.  Because I bore your name, O Lord, God of hosts, I did not sit celebrating in the circle of merrymakers; Under the weight of your hand I sat alone because you filled me with indignation. Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide! Thus the Lord answered me: If you repent, so that I restore you, in my presence you shall stand; If you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you, and you shall not turn to them; And I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail, For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you, says the Lord. I will free you from the hand of the wicked, and rescue you from the grasp of the violent.

The reading above is the first reading for this day.  In it, the Prophet Jeremiah laments his vocation, which was to call the idolatrous and overconfident people of the Kingdom of Judah back to the Covenant established from of old between them and their God.  Called by God as a young man, Jeremiah experienced rejection, mockery, and persecution throughout his life.  Some viewed him as a traitor and as an agent of the Babylonians, who destroyed Jerusalem during his lifetime.  Thus, he is a sign of Jesus Christ, and some people during the Lord’s public life believed that he was Jeremiah, returned to earth (cf. Matthew 16, 14).

Jeremiah is also a sign for the Christian because, just as we bear the name of Christ and are baptized into his Body, so we share his vocation of calling people to conversion.

Jeremiah bewails his birth: “Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth! a man of strife and contention to all the land!”  In the spiritual sense, the Christian recognizes that, in the Lord, he is a “sign of contradiction”, and he shows his natural aversion to a life of not-fitting-into society.  At the same time, he does not allow this to prevent him from carrying out the Lord’s will in his life.  “I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me.”  This might remind us of how the Lord quoted a children’s rhyme to describe how he was received by the people he came to save: “We have piped to you, and you have not danced: we have mourned, and you have not wept” (Luke 7, 32).  No matter how a Christian lives or speaks, the world will cry out against him.

“When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart.”  All the joy in Jeremiah’s life centered on the word of God.  The Christian “devours” the word of God in the Holy Scriptures, learning about God and his teachings, praying to him while reading, and applying the holy words to his own life.  The “words” here also mean learning the will of God and then doing it with zeal.  “Because I bore your name, O Lord, God of hosts, I did not sit celebrating in the circle of merrymakers; under the weight of your hand I sat alone because you filled me with indignation.”  As St. Paul says, we Christians should keep in mind that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3, 20).  And while we cannot avoid entirely the company of unbelievers, we ought to give preference to the company of those who share our Faith: “Bear not the yoke with unbelievers. For what share has justice with injustice? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has the faithful with the unbeliever?“ (2 Corinthians 6, 14-15).  

“Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?”  This “wound” is the longing for God that cannot be entirely satisfied here on earth.  As St. Augustine famously said, “My heart is restless until it rests in you!”  A certain level of restlessness will afflict our hearts until the moment we see God in heaven.  We speak with him in prayer and sometimes have marvelous insights or inspirations, but we are made by him to see him face to face, and we yearn for that with all our hearts.  For the saints, the presence of a single venial sin on their souls stings sharply because it may have the effect of prolonging the time until they see him.  “You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide!”  Rejected and mocked by worldly folks, the believer seeks the embrace of God as solace, but oftentimes, as in the Passion of Christ, we find ourselves crying out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27, 46).

“Thus the Lord answered me: If you repent, so that I restore you, in my presence you shall stand.”  The Blessed Virgin Mary excepted, all the saints are penitents, from former persecutors like St. Paul to seraphic souls like St. Aloysius Gonzaga.  Repentance and doing penance is a life-long project, as well.  Never will there come a time in our mortal life in which we can think we are perfected.  But in our repentance, God will raise us up to stand before him so that we may do his will as best as we are able.  “If you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you, and you shall not turn to them.”  That is, If you speak my words and do not insert your own agenda.  If we turn away from sin and persevere in virtue, we “stand” before God and  he will put his words in our mouths.  We will then become an effective sign of the Lord in the world, and at last people who have tired of the world or been cast off by it because of the pangs of conscience, or who suddenly see this earthly life for what it is, will turn to God and hear the words prepared for them from those whom God has made his “mouthpieces”.  

“And I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail.”  That is, those who continue to reject God and the call to grace will not harm them or silence their voices.  St. John, in the Book of Revelation, speaks of two witnesses whom God will particularly protect, but these words apply to Christians persevering in the world and whom God uses as his “mouthpieces” by their words and actions: “And if any man will hurt them, fire shall come out of their mouths and shall devour their enemies. And if any man will hurt them, in this manner must he be slain. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: And they have power over waters, to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with all plagues, as often as they will” 

(Revelation 11, 5-6).  All this to say, Do not be afraid of anyone.

“I am with you, to deliver and rescue you, says the Lord. I will free you from the hand of the wicked, and rescue you from the grasp of the violent.”  “I am with you”, that is, “God-is-with-us”, Emmanuel, the name given our Messiah in Isaiah 7, 14.  He will “deliver and rescue” us, that is, Yeshua, Jesus, for “God saves.”  And just as God delivered his Son from the hand of the wicked Jewish leadership and the violent Roman soldiers in the Resurrection, so will he deliver those of us who belong to him.  

Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus of Bethany.  We might remember her best in the account of how Jesus visited the home she shared with Her brother and sister, and how Martha toiled behind the scenes preparing a meal while Mary sat at the feet of the Lord, listening to him.  From this we learn that there is always work to be done, but prayer ranks highest among all that we may do, for it leads to Union with Christ.  Very likely, Martha and her brother and sister would have suffered from the persecution by the Jewish leaders of the early Christians, as they lived near Jerusalem and were well known as followers of Christ.  We may infer her importance in the early Church in Judea from the prominence St. John gives her in his Gospel.