Monday 30th July 2018

Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

LECTIONARY
401

FIRST READING
JER 13:1-11

The LORD said to me: Go buy yourself a linen loincloth;
wear it on your loins, but do not put it in water.
I bought the loincloth, as the LORD commanded, and put it on.
A second time the word of the LORD came to me thus:
Take the loincloth which you bought and are wearing,
and go now to the Parath;
there hide it in a cleft of the rock.
Obedient to the LORD's command, I went to the Parath
and buried the loincloth.
After a long interval, the LORD said to me:
Go now to the Parath and fetch the loincloth
which I told you to hide there.
Again I went to the Parath, sought out and took the loincloth
from the place where I had hid it.
But it was rotted, good for nothing!
Then the message came to me from the LORD:
Thus says the LORD:
So also I will allow the pride of Judah to rot,
the great pride of Jerusalem.
This wicked people who refuse to obey my words,
who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts,
and follow strange gods to serve and adore them,
shall be like this loincloth which is good for nothing.
For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man's loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty.
But they did not listen.

PSALM
DEUT 32:18-19, 20, 21

Response: You have forgotten God who gave you birth.

You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you,
You forgot the God who gave you birth.
When the LORD saw this, he was filled with loathing
and anger toward his sons and daughters.

"I will hide my face from them," he said,
"and see what will then become of them.
What a fickle race they are,
sons with no loyalty in them!"

"Since they have provoked me with their 'no-god'
and angered me with their vain idols,
I will provoke them with a 'no-people';
with a foolish nation I will anger them."

GOSPEL
verses

Jesus proposed a parable to the crowds.
"The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
It becomes a large bush,
and the 'birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.'"

He spoke to them another parable.
"The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened."

All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables.
He spoke to them only in parables,
to fulfill what had been said through the prophet:

I will open my mouth in parables,
I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation
of the world.

Daily Reflection

30th July 2018

Jeremiah, in the first reading, narrates a dramatic parable – dramatic, because it is a narrative of something Jeremiah actually did at the Lord’s command – which opened his eyes to Israel’s stubbornness, that had soiled their covenant with the Lord.

The unsoiled waistcloth that Jeremiah was asked to wear, represented the intimate connection between God and Israel. His action of hiding it under the rock near the Euphrates was symbolic of the Israelites deserting the land that God had given them and wandering to the Euphrates in Mesopotamia – a foreign culture with foreign gods that corrupted and spoiled them. Jeremiah finally retrieving his loin cloth all soiled and rotten, was again a reflection of what the unfaithfulness of the Israelites had reduced their covenantal relationship with God to.

We have the use of very illustrative parables in today’s Gospel as well. Jesus describes God’s Kingdom as a state of existence which we all need to help bring about. In witnessing to God’s love, we become catalysts for transforming the world.