This Abandoned House

 

Daily Office Reading; Sunday 7-11-2021 Year One

Matthew 23:29-39 (CJB)

³⁷ “Yerushalayim! Yerushalayim! You kill the prophets! You stone those who are sent to you! How often I wanted to gather your children, just as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but you refused! ³⁸ Look! God is abandoning your house to you, leaving it desolate.

Jesus is quoting Jeremiah 22:5

⁵ But if you will not pay attention to these words, then I swear by myself,” says Adonai, “that this palace will become a ruin.”’

More from Jeremiah 22:

²⁰ Climb up to the L’vanon and cry out,
raise your voice in Bashan,
cry out from ‘Avarim,
for all your lovers are broken.
²¹ I spoke to you in your times of prosperity,
but you said, ‘I won’t listen.’
This has been your pattern since you were young —
you pay no attention to what I say.
²² The wind will shepherd all your shepherds away,
and your lovers will go into captivity.

 

“All your lovers are broken—

The wind will shepherd all your shepherds away,

and your lovers will go into captivity.”

 

I used to read this passage in Matthew as Jesus being scornful: “You snakes! You sons of snakes!” “Hypocrites!”— but today it sounded to me more like an anguished lament.

 

There’s another line in Jeremiah 22 that cries out:

²⁹ Oh land, land, land— Hear the word of ADONAI!

 

And I hear an echo, not really with my ears, but faintly in the chambers of my heart:

 

Oh, my home, my home, why won’t you listen?

 

Why does it have to be this way?

Why must my lovers always be broken?

Now there’s nothing to do but hunker down

in the ruin of everything I ever loved,

and listen to the hollow hissing wind

scour all beauty and meaning out of the world—

driving all the patient caretakers into uselessness.

 

Such a lonesome wind,

gusting through all the empty corners

of this abandoned house.