Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 409

As Israel comes forward to be given his rest,
the LORD appears to him from afar:
With age-old love I have loved you;
so I have kept my mercy toward you.
Again I will restore you, and you shall be rebuilt,
O virgin Israel;
Carrying your festive tambourines,
you shall go forth dancing with the merrymakers.

What's fascinating is to watch how "God" changes when people sober up and decide to return to a sane, sensible way of life. The God who was continually threatening with jeremiads of gloom and doom, becomes caring, compassionate, and deeply sympathetic even to criminals condemned for their heinous crimes to a life of solitary confinement.

It's not God who changes but the sinner who acknowledges their sins and turns back to the Lord. But that fearful prejudice runs deep in this fallen world. It often takes a catastrophe of biblical proportions to help us see and recognize the Father who speaks to us in both Testaments of the Bible. Penitents see that He is just as fearful in the parables and teachings of Jesus as His Father was to Moses and his desert flock. And they are grateful. 

The violence we wreak on one another invariably fails to demonstrate compassion. No one whose city has been destroyed by incendiary bombs can suppose the enemy cared for them or meant "to teach them a lesson." They might see that open hostility will be met with exponentially more violence, but they will not find a merciful purpose in the killing. It was nothing but pure, unadulturated evil. And then to resist an overwhelming evil, they'll resort to guerrilla tactics which might continue for centuries. 

The biblical prophets saw in natural and man-made catastrophes the hand of God. Because the people did not respond to the gifts of peace, security, and prosperity with generous compassion for widows, orphans, and aliens; and would not hear the warnings of the prophets; God's people were abandoned to the natural cycles of a dynamic planet, which includes warfare among earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and blizzards. 

Eventually they must ask why has the Lord abandoned us, and their ancestors will respond through the Sacred Scriptures, "Turn back to the Lord." 

Psalm 107:

Some lived in darkness and gloom,

imprisoned in misery and chains.

Because they rebelled against God’s word,

and scorned the counsel of the Most High,

He humbled their hearts through hardship;

they stumbled with no one to help.

In their distress they cried to the LORD,

who saved them in their peril;

He brought them forth from darkness and the shadow of death

and broke their chains asunder.

Let them thank the LORD for his mercy,

such wondrous deeds for the children of Adam.

For he broke down the gates of bronze

and snapped the bars of iron. (vs 11-16)