Jeremiah 7:23-28
Luke 11:14-23
Robert Waldrop has written,
“Beware of giving voice to those who cannot speak. People will say you are filled with the devil and up to no good. They will try to distract attention from the good fruits of your works by casting aspersions on your motivations and backers.
“Has this not happened over and over again throughout human history? Give power to those who are rejected, and those who benefit from exploitation will fabricate lies and slanders against you.
“The Lord recaps to Jeremiah the tragic history of his people. Again and again prophets have been sent to preach justice and repentance and again and again the people have turned their backs on the Lord.
“'Faithfulness has disappeared,' in the Newspeak of the Israelite elite, it was not even in the dictionary. God's concern in the prophetic writings is evident in the extensive prophetic denunciations of the exploitation of the weak by the strong.
“In response to the slanders of those who profited from corruption, Jesus preaches that all who are not with him are against him, if we are not gathering with him, we are scattering.
“By giving voice to those who cannot speak, Jesus shows his credentials as the agent of the Reign of God which has come upon them, when they were least expecting it.”
Francis Martin writes,
“Just as obedience and trust bring about an enlargement of our heart and a deeper freedom, so disobedience and lack of trust bring about hardness of heart and slavery.
“The great truths of reality, as in their own way scientists can tell us, are not discovered by carefully controlled experiments but by a leap of the spirit, an intuition, a yielding to what is greater than we are. In fact, it is a law that the greater the truth, the more of the human person is involved in its knowing.
“Suppose...I tell you that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who by his human death and resurrection has reconciled the whole human race to God, and as a result, eternal life is being offered to you.
“You stand there before this truth, but it will take all of you to yield to the interior witness of the Holy Spirit to come to know and experience this reality. This is God's invitation at every moment.
Thomas H. Troeger has written this poem:
“A spendthrift lover is the Lord Who never counts the cost Or asks if heaven can afford To woo a world that's lost. Our lover tosses coins of gold Across the midnight skies And stokes the sun against the cold To warm us when we rise.
“Still more is spent in blood and tears To win the human heart, To overcome the violent fears That drive the world apart. Behold the bruised and thorn-crowned face Of one who bears our scars And empties out the wealth of grace That's hinted by the stars.
“How shall we love this heart-strong God Who gives us ev'rything, Whose ways to us are strange and odd, What can we give or bring? Acceptance of the matchless gift Is gift enough to give. The very act will shake and shift The way we love and live.”
Posted by John
at 12:01 AM CST