Friday of Week 19 in Ordinary Time
I love this rich and vivid
allegory. The story of Israel is the
story of a female baby, helpless and abandoned and left to die. Her umbilical cord is uncut. She is dirty, bloody, and un-pitied. Enter God, stage left. God walks by and
rescues her. She is smothered by over-the-top God-attention! She emerges as a
rare beauty.
Trouble! She is WOWED by her own beauty!
Things turn south quickly:
-Idolatry
-Whoredom
-Not regular whoredom though…whoredom
where the whore pays the Johns
-This is bad!
But God never abandons! Punishment…hell yes! But never abandonment! (check out missing verses)
But what catches my attention today is
verse 63:
…that you may be utterly silenced for
shame when I pardon you for all you have done, says the Lord.
It reminds me of Romans 12:20.
No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give
him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.
Somehow it is the experience of
shame…un-literal burning coals…that saves.
Shame is not a good thing…right?
When I think of shame I think one person shaming another. But this shame seems to come from
within. It appears to emerge after a
well-placed mirror (held by God or St. Paul or a really really good friend) allows one to see oneself for
real. It sounds more like what I would
call contrition…contrition of a very powerful sort.
This shame happens when I witness
another expressing the love of God in such a way that my own response to God’s
love falls pretty short. My shame is a
sign of my desire to close the gap between my insufficient response and the deeper
response of another.
I need such others.
I need a little more of that kind of
shame.
But the word is a little too loaded in
my cultural context…
Contrition it is!
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