God alone Saves

When I opened today’s Scriptures, what jumped out at me was the first sentence of Hosea 14: 2-10: “Thus says the Lord:  Return, O Israel, to the Lord, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt.”  How often I collapse through my guilt.  My ego is quickly deflated when the Spirit alerts me to my sinful behaviors and/or attitudes.  This is an invitation to “return, …[Dorothy Ann] to the Lord, your God.”  You need to repent, acknowledge your selfishness, your pride, your deceptiveness, your envy and/or jealousy, your resentments and anger. You need to ask yourself: “What is going on here?” 

The Lord then says to me, further on in this reading: “…[R]eceive what is good, that we may render as offerings the bullocks from our stalls.” “Offering bullocks [or any other animal for sacrifice] was Israel’s way of saying “I’m sorry, Lord. Forgive us our sinfulness, our worship of idols [how often the self, the ego is our idol] and make us right with You, the only true God.   Translating this in terms of the New Covenant, it might read:  [R]eceive what is good, [Dorothy Ann, that is, receive God’s forgiveness, become reconciled with Me, your God, in the sacrament of Reconciliation], that we [the Trinity] may render the offering [of Jesus’ body and blood] in the celebration of the Mass. 

Even more powerful are the next words in this reading: “Assyria will not save us, nor shall we have horses to mount; we shall say no more, ‘Our god,’ to the work of our hands….” The “Assyrias”, that is,  whatever source that is not God  to which  I look to rescue me from my shame--will not save me. Nothing, other than God, has the strength to whisk me away from evil. I have no “horse” to mount other than the mountain of the Lord.

Help me, Lord, to live by this decree, so that in the words of today’s Gospel, Mark 12: 28-34, I will realize that “He is the One and there is no other than he.”