30 July 2018
Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
Image of Divine Intimacy
Today is the ninth day of our novena of meditations in preparation for the feast of St. Ignatius, which is tomorrow. We will conclude our novena by reflecting on an image, taken directly from scripture, of our intimate relationship with God.
Jeremiah is often called the prophet of doom because his prophecies were so severe. Again and again he warned the people that by turning away from God, they were storing up wrath for themselves: death, destruction, exile, etc. That message was not popular then and it is not popular now. So be it.
Therefore, let us take an extra measure of caution not to ignore what God has revealed for us through this prophet. For example, in chapter thirteen, God tells Jeremiah to buy, of all things, a loincloth, and to wear it and to bury it in another town. Then, after a long time, God commands Jeremiah to dig it up, and, of course, the thing is rotten.
The point is that God made us to be as close to him as a loincloth is to a human body (please do imagine this!), but we preferred to be away from him, in some other town, packed under the dirt. As a result, we have become rotten and corrupt. How could we ever be saved? What we need, like Jeremiah’s loincloth, is some miraculous kind of purification and restoration, in order to heed God’s call “to cling to me,” (can you imagine?), and “to be my people, my fame, my praise, my glory” (Jer 13:11). Can you imagine what this means?