Rejecting God's Covenant and the Consequences

Our salvation history begins in the Old Testament and is culminated in the New Testament with the life, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, who, unlike Israel, was obedience to and trusting the Father unto death.  The pattern of sin, of disobedience and lack of trust ,  which dominates the Old Testament stories continues to this very day: silence (not passing one’s faith on to one’s children),  sin (choosing one’s own will over God’s will), punishment (suffering the consequences of sin, of abandoning God’s ways), supplication (begging for help to be freed from one’s slavery to sin, to worshipping one’s own will, the will of other people when that will is opposed to God’s ways),  God’s mercy and forgiveness, and a return to the Lord.  The cycle repeats itself over and over and over again.  We read in today’s first reading, 2 Kings 17: 5-8, 13-15a, 18, that the Northern Kingdom, the ten tribes of the Israelites “rejected …[God’s| statues, the covenant which he had made with their…[ancestors], and the warnings which he had given them ,[through the prophets], till, in his great anger against Israel, the Lord put them away out of his sight. Only the tribe of Judah (the  two tribes known as the Southern Kingdom) was left.

Will we heed the prophets in our day, prophets like Pope Francis, our pastors, those in our midst who do heed God’s laws, who do  listen to God’s voice? Or will we, like the 10 Northern tribes, reject God’s ways> Will we  risk being “put…away out of…[God’s] sight”  forever? With the psalmist in today’s liturgy’s responsorial psalm , Ps. 60, we pray:  “O God, …rally us! You have rocked the country and split it open; repair the cracks in it, for…[our world, our country, society as a whole] is tottering. You have made your people feel hardships; you have given us stupefying wine. Have not you, O God, rejected us, so that you go not forth, O God, with our armies [of destructive weapons or with our idolatry of money and economic security that is used to crush poorer nations and poorer people]? Give us aid against the foe [of materialism, capitalism, individualism, selfishness, and greed], for worthless is the help of [other human beings, other nations].”