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Friday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time
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July 1, 2022“Go and Learn the Meaning of the Words”
Today’s liturgy’s first reading marks the culmination of the book of the prophet Amos’s great prophesies of doom for those who continue to ignore God’s word. They are still not easy to hear. But without tomorrow’s reading that ends Amos, they would seem incomplete because there Amos, for all his fury and seeming despair, raises the great flag of hope that God (who truly does have all things in hand) will finally triumph and lead the faithful to the fulness of salvation where the “Wine shall flow down the mountainside and all the hills shall run with it.” But in order for that to happen, we must first truly hear God’s word and repent (change our ways).
We today in our tumultuous world ought very much hear Amos’s prophecies as directed to us. We think of what we are doing to our mother Earth, ravaging her resources, wastefully and wantonly abusing our stewardship, heedlessly and selfishly exploiting her bounty, not caring that we are exploiting it mindlessly, polluting everything and destroying the delicate balance of nature in our greed. If we do not change, we as the human race will pay a terrible price for this willful blindness.
We think of how we as a nation have become tribal, full of fear of the “outsider” who dares threaten our feelings of security. We hurl anathemas and condemnations at one another full of self-righteous fury and resentment, convinced that we alone know the truth, we alone are right. We are full of judgement and rage directed at all who do not agree with us. We forget the final prayer of Jesus that we may all be one. We forget that Jesus told us to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. Only love enables us to rise above our differences. Only love overcomes fear.
Unless we are willing to give up our absolute certitude, something entirely rooted in pride and arrogance, then we cease being teachable, even by the Holy Spirit. Unless we become willing to humbly admit that we do not know everything, indeed that we know very little at all, then we choose darkness, which is the only thing that comes from pride and arrogance. Because it is very much a choice, as Moses told the people. A choice between life and death. Choose life, Moses urged us.
Jesus told the Pharisees, go and learn the meaning of mercy. The Pharisees, those men who were so tightly wrapped in their religion, their self-righteousness and their certainty that they alone were right, those men who so easily condemned and rejected so many, that they entirely missed the author and savior of life standing right in front of them. Only love, the one thing necessary, enables us to see beneath the differences and obstacles that threaten our unity in God, who completely loves all persons equally. God loves us not because we were perfect, worthy or lovable. Just the opposite. When we were lost in sin and selfishness God loved us completely, forgiving us and sending us God’s only Son. If we are then without that love, we have nothing, no matter how right we may be, no matter how clearly we may understand things, no matter what. Only God’s love, poured out on the world, enables us to forgive one another, bear with one another, accept one another as we are, not as we wish the other to be. That is what it means to love one another as Jesus loved us. When Jesus uttered his last words from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he did not pray that solely for his executioners. He prayed that prayer for us all.
