Containment Considerations, Part the Third

“Come, let us return to the LORD,

For it is he who has torn, but he will heal us;

he has struck down, but he will bind our wounds.

2

He will revive us after two days;

on the third day he will raise us up,

to live in his presence.

3

Let us know, let us strive to know the LORD;

as certain as the dawn is his coming.

He will come to us like the rain,

like spring rain that waters the earth.”

4

What can I do with you, Ephraim?

What can I do with you, Judah?

Your loyalty is like morning mist,

like the dew that disappears early.

5

For this reason I struck them down through the prophets,

I killed them by the words of my mouth;

my judgment shines forth like the light.

6

For it is loyalty that I desire, not sacrifice,

and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6)

I’m definitely not of the chastisement camp made famous by the televangelists, but I do want to heed the famous remarks of Our Lord concerning the citizens whose blood Pilate had mingled with sacrifices and others upon whom fell the tower of Siloam: “Were they greater sinners than anyone else? By no means! But I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish as they did!” (Lk 13:3)

“As they did” means more the fact of perdition common to all sinners than the manner, which varies in terms of its causes. Otherwise it still suggests exact correlation of the manner of one’s living with the conditions of one’s dying, which is not true—and would not be just if it were true. We all are going to perish; the when and how aren’t certain, that’s all.

There’s nothing wrong with us taking these days as a warning. For what? Repentance, reform of life along basic discipleship lines: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We can never go wrong this way.

The same God who permits chastisement (from the Latin castus, “pure”), found in the opening from Hosea, also gives consolation. Meanwhile He does not retract the call to repentance, which is a cherished path of purification.

To make a sandwich of these: repentance is the meat, chastisement is the mustard, and consolation is the condiment. The roll? Knowledge of the Lord.

“On the third day he will raise us up”: Hints of the resurrection of Jesus appear in the Hebrew Scriptures. As the suffering servant of the Lord in Deutero-Isaiah has been identified with the people alternately with a particular unnamed individual, there’s also a communal dimension to resurrection and vindication for that chastised people/individual.

I love how the prophet openly acknowledges the evanescence of Ephraim’s piety. He knows it won’t last long. Remember 9/11. Remember human nature, remember the passage of time, the absence that makes the heart grow fatter.

God “slew them by the words of his mouth.” That’s exactly what Jesus does many times over, taking for an example His tag line in the Gospel from the Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent: “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”

The “both/and” nature of Catholicism builds upon the Semitic device where “this, not that” means “that, not without this.” Therefore Hosea’s famous “I desire loyalty, not sacrifice” means “I desire sacrifice but not without loyalty”; “Without loyalty, what good is sacrifice?”