Memorial of Saint Martha
Today's Mass Readings
Today’s first reading from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah is prayed every Friday in the third week of the Psalter, as the second Psalm/hymn prayer for Morning prayer. In its biblical context, verses 17-18 represent God’s response to His disobedient people who have forsaken Him. These verses foretell what will happen to God’s people when the Babylonians come in and destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, killing Israelites left and right, before taking most of the remainder into exile in Babylon. Verses 19-22 represent the Prophet Jeremiah’s attempt to intercede on behalf of his people, imploring the Lord’s mercy. God’s response to Jeremiah, which is not found in today’s reading, nor in the Psalter of the Divine Office, is pretty harsh: “Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me, my heart would not turn toward this people” (Jeremiah 15:1). God goes even further: “Send them away from me” (15:1). But it doesn’t end there. Anticipating the question, “to where shall we go,” God answers the unasked question: “Whoever is marked for death, to death; whoever is marked for the sword, the sword; whoever is marked for famine, to famine; whoever is marked for captivity, to captivity” (15:2). And if you think that’s rough, just read a little further and you’ll see that God hasn’t finished speaking yet: “Four kinds of scourge I have decreed against them…the sword to slay them; dogs to drag them about; the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy them” (15:3). It gets even worse, but, eventually it gets even better. You should read Jeremiah chapter 31 sometime, and you’ll see that this is a God of mercy. The Babylonians did indeed do what God predicted through Jeremiah. But the Babylonian exile only lasted 70 years, a jubilee we might say. And then God had mercy. And after a jubilee of jubilees, about 490 years (7 times 70---see the book of Daniel 9:24-27), Jesus showed up and poured out God’s mercy on the whole world.
Even the evils that befell Israel because of the Babylonian exile can be seen as curative and restorative. As the Old Testament prophets clarify, Israel was dying from the inside out from spiritual ills in the form of idolatry and injustice. The physical ills that befell Israel during the Babylonian exile created a space for repentance and acts of penance and martyrdom. Through such repentance, penance, and martyrdom, the Israelites in exile turned back to God, and reentered the land from whence they were scattered. The violence of the exile was transformed into a spiritual Lenten pilgrimage, made partially complete when the Temple in Jerusalem began to be rebuilt.
Today is the memorial of St. Martha. In today’s reading from St. John’s Gospel, we see God’s mercy poured out through Jesus in the raising of Lazarus. We don’t encounter the actual raising of Lazarus in the abridged passage in today’s reading, but we see this raising anticipated in Martha’s faith. Jesus tells us that He is the resurrection, He is life. Martha professes her faith in Jesus even before Lazarus is raised from the dead.
This is the God we worship. If we were to stop reading the Book of Jeremiah at God’s lament, we would think our God is a vicious God. We need to read the end of the story. Death and destruction are never the end. God’s merciful end is life, resurrection. Let us take comfort in God’s promise of new life for us. Let us also try to allow God to transform our sorrows into opportunities to draw closer to Him. Our God is a God who writes straight with crooked lines, and who can work the most marvelous wonders through the most horrible of circumstances.
Jeff Morrow