Called to be God's Praise, God's Renown, God's Beauty

In today’s first reading, Jeremiah 13: 1-11, the prophet is asked by the Lord to purchase a linen loincloth and wear it on his loins but not to put it in water. Later, the Lord asks him to hide the cloth in the cleft of a rock. Much later, he is commanded to retrieve it. It has rotted and is good for nothing. That, the Lord says to Jeremiah, is what will happen to the Chosen People. “I will allow the pride of Judah to rot, the great pride of Jerusalem….For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins, so had I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me,…; to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty. But they did not listen.” No, “they have provoked me with their ‘no-god’ and angered me with their vain idols, [and I] will provoke them with a ‘no-people’; with a foolish nation I will anger them.”

In Christ Jesus and through the apostles, God has chosen Gentiles, all non-Jewish peoples, “to be His people, His renown, His praise, His beauty”. Like the Chosen People of the Old Covenant, however, many persons of  the New Covenant are also “provoking God with their ‘no-god’ and angering God with their vain idols.” (Dt. 32: 18-21, today’s responsorial psalm).

In your baptism, confirmation, reconciliation and reception of the Eucharist, you and I are those Gentiles made into God's people, God's renown, God's praise, God's beauty. Are we, too, provoking God by clinging to “no-gods”? Are we angering God with our vain idols? Or are  we building God’s Kingdom by growing in God’s love, the love into which we were baptized and confirmed and are nurtured in the Eucharist, in the reading of the Word and in our efforts to realize our union with God and others. From “the Rock that begot…[us]” (Dt. 32: 18-21),  may we stand firm in our efforts to plant seeds of love, reconciliation, justice and peace into the world in which we live.