23 July 2020
Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah gives me an excellent description of sin in today’s first reading. He says, it is a rejection of “the source of living waters”, that is, God. It is also the image of broken cisterns.
I am used to the first image, but when I am faced with temptation it isn’t persuasive. It becomes abstract. A rejection of God; a substitution of a nothing? Too conceptual, theoretical.
Jeremiah concretizes sin in his second image, and that is easier for me to identify with because it is part of my own experience. For someone living in a desert, water is a need; it is the source of life. So, he’ll build a cistern to keep it. Then, he finds the cistern, he has dreamed of and built, leaks. What a downer!
Temptation to sin promises fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness, putting up a sturdy cistern where I keep forever all the favors I cherish. So, I give in only to discover that the imagined cistern leaks. God alone is the living water I so crave, and when I sin, it means I reject him now and choose a promised faulty substitute.
Jesus gave us the Our Father as an ideal prayer, and so today I’ll spend time today reflecting on the petition “deliver us from evil”, praying for the grace to reject designs to build leaky cisterns, with no company guarantees, and the understanding why they leak.