Tuesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Hosea 8:4–7, 11–13
The night before his wedding, his friends teased him:
“After tomorrow, you will have no say anymore.”
He protested.
So they challenged him:
“Then prove it. When the priest asks you, do not answer immediately.”
For reasons hard to understand, he listened.
The next day, when the priest asked,
“Do you take Anna to be your wife?”
he remained silent.
The priest repeated the question.
Still silence.
At last, he said:
“Yes, I do.”
But it was too late.
When Anna was asked the same question,
she said:
“No.”
And left the church.
Some choices look small when we make them.
But they can open the door to consequences we never imagined.
In today’s reading, Hosea uses a powerful image:
“They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
Sowing and reaping is a common biblical image.
Normally, we sow seed and later reap grain.
But Hosea says that Israel has sown wind.
But wind cannot be sown.
So what does Hosea mean?
Israel had chosen kings without the Lord.
They had built sanctuaries without obedience.
They had made golden calves and called it worship.
They had multiplied altars, but forgotten the Lord’s teaching.
God had given them His Torah, His loving instruction, His way of life.
But they disregarded it.
They did not want to listen.
And the whirlwind came.
Israel would lose its land.
Samaria would fall.
The people would be taken into exile.
It would be like going back to Egypt, back to slavery,
a tragic reversal of the Exodus.
Jesus tells a similar truth in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
The rich man lived comfortably, but ignored the poor man at his gate.
After death, when he finally understood, he wanted someone to warn his brothers.
But Abraham answered:
“They have Moses and the prophets.”
In other words:
They already have God’s word.
But like their dead brother, they did not intend to listen.
Without knowing it, they too were sowing the wind,
and the wind would return against them as a whirlwind.
So we must ask:
What are we sowing?
In our personal lives, in our families, in the Church, in society, in the world?
Selfishness, or mutual care?
Injustice, or justice?
Greed, or solidarity?
The wind may look harmless at the beginning.
But one day, it returns as a whirlwind.
Biblical Reflections on the Gospel of Matthew
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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