Tuesday in the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 5, 2022

Hosea 8, 4-7; 11-13

Thus says the Lord: They made kings in Israel, but not by my authority; they established princes, but without my approval. With their silver and gold they made idols for themselves, to their own destruction. Cast away your calf, O Samaria! my wrath is kindled against them; How long will they be unable to attain innocence in Israel? The work of an artisan, no god at all, Destined for the flames, such is the calf of Samaria! When they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind; The stalk of grain that forms no ear can yield no flour; Even if it could, strangers would swallow it. When Ephraim made many altars to expiate sin, his altars became occasions of sin. Though I write for him my many ordinances, they are considered as a stranger’s. Though they offer sacrifice, immolate flesh and eat it, the Lord is not pleased with them. He shall still remember their guilt and punish their sins; they shall return to Egypt.

The northern ten tribes of Israel broke away from Judea and Benjamin after the death of King Solomon under a former court official named Jeroboam, who was not related to the royal family.  God thus says through the Prophet Hosea, “They made kings in Israel, but not by my authority; they established princes, but without my approval.”  The kings of Israel, in the eyes of the Lord, had no legitimacy because he did not approve them as he had approved of Saul (and then removed it) and David, and, after David, Solomon and then his son Rehoboam.  God says that this usurpation against his anointed kings in Jerusalem has led to replacing him with gods of silver and gold.  God tells of the effects of this double rebellion: “When they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind; The stalk of grain that forms no ear can yield no flour.”  That is, when a person burns down his own house, he has no place to live.  The rejection of reality and the creation of one’s own authority — which sometimes people call “autonomy” — results in failure and emptiness.  “When Ephraim made many altars to expiate sin, his altars became occasions of sin.”  Attempts to live a life of autonomy, holding oneself as the only authority and worshipping one’s self as a god, provide no way back to reality.  In the end, persons who uproot tradition and properly consisted authority and who attempt to impose their fantasies about reality on others attain the opposite of what they seek.  An absolute devotion to freedom causes a person to fall into slavery: “They shall return to Egypt.”  God’s gift of freedom means freedom from sin and ignorance, and freedom to live the life to which God calls us.  Political freedom is a very modern concept and derives from the freedom that comes from God.  Political freedom, in its best form, facilitates the living out of the life to which God calls us and protects us from that which would impede us in so living.

In today’s Gospel Reading (Matthew 9, 32-38), the Pharisees desperately search for a way of protecting their worldview by accusing the Lord Jesus of exorcising demons with the aid of demons.  The Pharisees lived in a very much self-constructed universe in which their interpretation of the Scriptures was alone valid, and the caricature they made of the Messiah from cherry-picked passages of the Scriptures alone was true.  They had rejected the true word of God for their own fantasies.  Without any official appointment or ordination, they made themselves the “teachers of Israel”.  

Every generation seems to brings us new Pharisees with their new orthodoxies, but eventually they fall into their own traps and disappear.  The Lord counsels us throughout the Scriptures to persevere in the Faith which is given to us through the Church and not to look behind us or to either side, but only to look ahead to the Basis of all reality, which is Almighty God: “Veer neither to the right, nor to the left: turn away your foot from evil” (Proverbs 4, 27).