I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one, who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.

Many people are intimidated by the portrait of God in the Old Testament.  Not a few modern readers fancy that he is simply a terrible and powerful old man who gets angry on a fairly random basis and that there is really no telling what he might do next.  Hosea, however, learned by painful experience the great secret of his God: he is a jilted lover who will not stop loving.  Hosea married a woman named Gomer who spent a good deal of time cheating on him.  He went through all the anguish that any normal husband or wife endures upon discovering that his trust and love had been bitterly betrayed.  But he saw in his own experience a deeper insight by the grace of the Holy Spirit: he saw that this was precisely what God had suffered for centuries at the hands of his beloved Israel.  He saw further that God’s love was so deep that despite Israel’s betrayals and prostitution to other gods, God was not willing to abandon the marriage.  In today’s verse we find a sort of choking and bittersweet reminiscence by God about the time he rescued his beloved from slavery in Egypt, protected them in their travels, and gave them the land of Canaan as a gift.  He did it out of pure love for Israel and received profoundly impure love in return.  But, as is the way with God, he did not give up.  For God knew what Israel was made of all along and was, even in the midst of Hosea’s struggles, preparing the way for the true Son whom he would “call out of Egypt” (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15). It was this Son who would in turn call Israel out of bondage, not to Egypt, but to sin and marry a new kind of Bride “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:26-27).

C. S. Lewis once remarked that he was a “converted pagan living in a nation of apostate Puritans.”  Most serious Christians in the English-speaking world are in something of a similar situation.  That is, because of the overwhelming dominance of American culture, American habits of thought tend to color the thinking even of those who are not themselves American.  One clear example of this is the way in which an average person will react to Paul’s phrase “the desires of the flesh.”  Being a culture of apostate Puritans, secularized Americans and those influenced by them have a more or less adolescent obsession with sex and therefore assume that everyone else must share their obsession.

Thus, when Pope John Paul II publishes an encyclical such as Veritatis Splendor that is a wide-ranging philosophical discourse covering acres and acres of human thought, the only thing the media can do is comb through it in search of a couple of remarks about sexuality and announce that the Church is hung up on sex.  In the same way, when Paul speaks of the “desires of the flesh” most modern readers have difficulty grasping that he has in mind far more than our sex drive (which, in Catholic understanding, is neither good nor evil any more than hunger or thirst are moral qualities).  Rather, for Paul, the desires of the flesh include not only fornication but “impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.”  This means that the central sin for Paul is not illicit sexual desire but is rather the focus on the self as the center of the universe.  Moreover, for Paul, health and life consist not of the denial of sexuality (he, like Jesus, exalts marriage as a great thing (Ephesians 5) but in “walking by the Spirit” — the very Spirit who invented sex and said, “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).  If we walk by that Spirit, we shall find not only sex but all that is human transformed by the mutual self-giving love that is at the heart of life in Christ Jesus.

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

This verse is in the context of bearing fruit in your life. It’s an obvious conclusion that the branches cannot live without the vine, but how many days go by without communing with Christ? If Jesus isn’t your source of nourishment, what kind of fruit are you producing? Make the necessary changes and abide in Him. When you go to bed tonight, ask yourself the question, “During this day, what did I spiritually eat?”

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

As people created in the image of God, we are created to give thanks. Throughout today, look for opportunities to thank God for the small things at work, at home and as you mingle in society. Remember that having a thankful heart doesn’t change God, it changes you. Give thanks for a change.

For this gospel I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, and therefore I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me.

One temptation we constantly face in a world hostile to the Faith is the temptation to protect God as though he is helpless.  Faced with the latest ugly lie flung at our faith by the TV or movies, we Catholics can fall prey, not merely to holy anger fueled by the love of God (such as Jesus felt when he cleared the Temple) but to an unholy anger fueled (if we really admit it) by a fear of the world’s assaults and a sort of pride in ourselves.  The pride is a subtle thing, but it is the undercurrent of that sort of anger because such anger really means, “How can the Church survive if I don’t blaze away in defense of it and blast those nasty people who control the media and have so much power?”  The answer of today’s verse to such fear and pride is “The Church can survive without me quite nicely because it is God who guards it, not me.  And he has far more power than Ted Turner or some art museum in Brooklyn.”  This does not, of course, mean that we can simply ignore our duty to defend the Faith from attack.  But it does mean that we must always speak out on behalf of Jesus and his Church, not in the fear that it will never make it without us, but in the confidence that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

Being a voice crying in the wilderness sounds much more romantic than it really is.  Everybody likes to dally with the idea of being a brave soul who speaks truth to power and faces down the Big Cheeses from City Hall as Jimmy Stewart did in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”.  But when it comes to actually doing it, we generally pass.  And no wonder.  John the Baptist did it and look what it got him: a life in the desert, wearing a hair shirt, eating bugs, and being made fun of by the urban sophisticates who came out from Jerusalem to see what the country folk were so excited about.  From the outside, it appears that John the Baptist spent his life shouting into the wind and was rewarded with prison and decapitation for his troubles.  Not very romantic.  But on the inside, where God lives, it was worth every second.  For John knew where he began and where he ended.  He knew who he was: the friend of the Bridegroom and he knew the voice of the God of peace when it spoke out of heaven and said, “This is my Beloved Son.”  That is peace indeed and a source of strength that made him able to speak truth to power, not like an actor before cameras but like a prophet of God.

A liberal man will be enriched,
and one who waters will himself be watered.

Yesterday we read of God’s generosity as a magnificent king.  Today we are reminded that we too are kings and queens and are called to live and act in that knowledge.  “Liberality” in Scripture means, not leftist political leanings of course, but generosity, open-handedness and certain relaxed gladness in giving.  The Scriptural promises concerning giving and receiving are ultimately focused, not on “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” but on really and truly giving with no thought of return so that, paradoxically, we may be rewarded with treasure in heaven.  In a certain sense then, biblical giving is done in the hope and expectation of a reward.  Jesus himself never rebuked the disciples when they asked “what’s is it for me” (Mark 10:28).  But he also assured them that their rewards were going to be heavenly, not earthly.  That is why he commanded them to go to the poor, the weak, the blind, the lame: in short, to those who could not repay them.  For ultimately they and we are to give a gift in his name that nobody could ever pay for: salvation. As Jesus said, “You will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:14).

For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
he bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does the LORD withhold
from those who walk uprightly.

The psalms are poetry first and foremost and today’s passage is a particularly poetic piece of poetry.  Read from the standpoint of pure logic-chopping rationalism, today’s passage is most odd.  “The Lord God is a sun and a shield.”  What a curious combination of images.  What has the sun got to do with a shield?  But the moment we drop our hard-boiled rationalism and simply receive the images as images we notice something: this psalm is intensely heraldic.  It immediately puts us in mind of the coats of arms and shields (often decorated with suns) used by knights in armor or great kings like Arthur or David or Charlemagne.  It is this quality of kingly valor and magnanimity that the psalms want us to see in God.  It speaks of a sort of courtliness of which all earthly royalty is but a dim reflection.  In the ancient Near East it was the glory of kings to “bestow favors” on courtiers and, in so doing, to show forth glory, majesty and generosity.  God, in this passage, declares that no earthly king can be more generous than he.  For he withholds “no good thing” from his children.  That means, quite simply, that the whole world belongs to those who walk in his ways, for all creation is good.  And greater than all this is the gift he has given of his own Son, whom he “handed over” to us first in death and then in everlasting life—a life now “handed over” to us with each and every Eucharist we receive.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

In the days of the early Church, there arose a heresy called “gnosticism”. Gnosticism was not so much a particular sect as a constellation of ideas that were fuzzy but had a distinct flavor (much as the New Age movement does today).  Among these ideas was the notion that we were saved, not by the love of God so much as by our mastery of elaborate secret knowledge and-mark this-that this secret knowledge would set our spirits free from the prison of the body.  For the gnostic, spirit and body were always thought of as opposites. The curious thing about gnosticism was that it resulted in two diametrically opposed systems of thought.  For some schools of gnosticism the opposition of body and the spirit meant that our duty was to treat the body with the harshest contempt.  For such gnostics, cruel asceticism was the rule and the body was subjected to the harshest treatment. Jesus was pitted by them against the God of the Old Testament in such thinking because, it was reasoned, Jesus meant to liberate us from the evil system of matter and bodily imprisonment created by the “bad God”. On the other hand, there were gnostics who reasoned that the opposition of body and spirit meant the body could do anything without effecting the spirit. This school went in for orgies and every form of self-indulgence, all the while pretending they were “holy within”.  But the Church of Christ went on teaching the truth:  The Word became flesh.  Body and spirit are married in Christ Jesus and we who are in him can and must glorify God in our bodies, not apart from them just as Jesus did when he died and rose–bodily–and ascended to his Father.

Torah, the Hebrew word for “law”, comes from the root word yarah, an archer’s term, which speaks of hitting the mark. The law not only teaches us what pleases God, but it informs us of the sin that needs to go. As Israel struggled with sin of worshipping the golden calf and was in great need of God’s instruction, so you can learn from their experience. Do God’s word and hit the bullseye in your life.