Homily for Monday, 7 July 2014– Ferial

Monday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time 

Readings of the day: Hosea 2:16, 17c-18, 21-22; Psalm 145:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 9:18-26

Perhaps some of us who are married or have been in love would be best able to answer this: Have you (to the person you love) or has the person you love ever written a strange love letter? What was the purpose or context of this letter? Did the letter achieve its purpose?

This is what God does through the prophet Hosea in our first reading today: God writes the people of Israel, God’s beloved, a strange love letter. It begins with God saying to Israel: “I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.”

For how many of us would a trip out into a desert be our idea of a great date? I suspect most of us would prefer to see a movie, or go to a concert or a sporting event… anything but going out into a boring, bone-dry, hot desert.

The special relationship like a marriage, called a covenant, between God and Israel had been strained by the time of Hosea. The people of Israel were worshiping other gods (“baal”) instead of worshiping the one God; loving God as God loved the people of Israel. God and God’s beloved Israel need a heart-to-heart in the intimacy only the desert affords. Hosea prophecies the success of this heart-to-heart between Israel and God; their relationship will again be like that of a husband and wife who have been married for decades and have survived many “desert” moments.

She shall call me “My husband,” and never again “My baal.” In other words, Israel’s faithfulness to God will be renewed; their relationship saved and strengthened. Hosea puts much faith in the success of God’s strange love letter to Israel; in the heart-to-heart in Israel’s exile; in the desert between Israel and her God!

How many of us have ever written a love letter or received one from someone you love and/or to whom you are married? What was the purpose of this letter? Was it simply to say, “I love you,” or to express more specific feelings of joy or perhaps giving or receiving forgiveness? How did the other person (or you, if you received the letter) perceive it?

Have any of us, at prayer, ever imagined the love letter we would write to God, or that God would write to us? Perhaps God would encourage us in the love we have and already express for God and for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Perhaps there are areas in our lives in which we, like the people of Israel, need a timely heart-to-heart with God; when we are invited to ask God’s forgiveness for when we have not loved as God loves us.

We can be sure that God’s love letter to us will be strange, because even at our best no love is as great as God’s love for us. We can be sure that, as long as we try at minimum to love God and one another as sisters and brothers in Christ, we will be successful because God is always present to strengthen our love. Now, then, is perhaps the time for us to accept God’s invitation to that prayer date in the desert…