for August 7
Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

God has always maintained an intimate involvement with the world he created. In the third chapter of Genesis he is taking an evening walk in the Garden of Eden looking for Adam and Eve. “Where are you?” he calls, implying that he’s accustomed to spending time with them. But on this occasion they’re hiding because they’ve just eaten fruit from the forbidden tree and now they want to keep their distance from God. God, however, does not keep his distance from them. He coaxes Adam and Eve out of hiding and reestablishes his relationship with them in the new circumstances they have brought upon themselves by breaking faith with him. He expels them from the garden, but first he replaces the fig leaves they fashioned for themselves with leather garments of his own making that are better suited to the new, harsher environment they will now inhabit. And he continues to care for them and their descendants (that includes us) in their exile.

The Bible is the story of God’s unflagging efforts to bring humanity back into the harmonious intimacy we originally shared with him. The pattern established by our original sin and God’s response of imposing judgment on our sinfulness and simultaneously helping us manage and learn from the consequences of his judgment has continued through the millennia. We learn our lesson and achieve a moment of peace and contentment only to hear the sly voice in our ear enticing us to believe we deserve even more.

This pattern provides the common thread of the Old Testament prophets, who repeatedly raise the alarm when the Jews start to backslide in their keeping of the Law and the covenant. The prophets’ warnings that the people’s declining faithfulness will result in their losing their comfortable lives and self-determination as a people go unheeded. Over the centuries the united kingdom of Israel and Judah is divided, the northern kingdom of Israel is conquered by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom of Judah is conquered by the Babylonians. The short Book of Nahum, which today’s first reading summarizes, comes between the fall of the two kingdoms. Nahum’s prophecy concerns the Assyrians, whose capital is Nineveh. The judgment on the Israelites is coming to an end and the Assyrians will now themselves be conquered. However, the Babylonians who conquer Assyria and liberate the Jews of Israel will in time conquer the Jews of Judah, destroy Jerusalem, and exile the population. The measure of God’s justice is faithfulness to the covenant.

The responsorial today is not a psalm but an excerpt from Deuteronomy that foreshadows the coming history. Written many years after the Exodus, the book recaps that event. Today’s section is written as one of Moses’s final exhortations to the people before his death, which occurs shortly before they enter the promised land. Moses recalls for them the covenant and the justice they will face from God if they break it. But the justice is always paired with mercy. “It is I who bring both death and life, I who inflict wounds and heal them,” says the Lord.

In the Gospel passage, Jesus echoes this understanding of justice: “The Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory and then he will repay each according to his conduct.” Yet right conduct can be challenging. Because sin is threaded through the world, living justly can require standing up to it, not just avoiding it. You may find yourself face to face with evil through no fault of your own. That is why following Jesus requires denying yourself and taking up your cross. As Christians, our faithfulness is in being true to Jesus’s law of love and living faithfully is not always comfortable. The good news is that even if we fall short or get tangled up in sin, God seeks us out and helps us repair our relationship with him.
—Christine Szczepanowski 

The readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.