Letting Things Go Sour

Homily for Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Some have suggested that the term “Original Sin” might be fittingly described as “the tendency of a good thing to go sour.” Adam and Eve had a good life in the Garden of Eden. Yet they were not able to be satisfied with what they had and fell when they wanted something they could not have.

In today’s first reading, we finish the readings about King Solomon, the son of King David, who has reigned for 40 years just as his father had reigned. Solomon had a very good thing going and had been visited three times by God. We are very familiar with the first meeting when God granted him his request of possessing the wisdom to judge between the right and the wrong. A few chapters later, God appears to Solomon again and reminds him to walk according to God’s statutes and decrees. A few chapters later, in a third and final visit from God, he was told that if he continued in the way that he was going, God would “cut off Israel from the land.”

Solomon married many wives from the various nations that surrounded Israel. In this action, he is making strong alliances with his neighbors – which would obviously be a good thing. However, in his zeal to placate his wives, he allowed them to continue worshiping the gods of their home country. Eventually he even built them temples or high places where his wives could offer incense to idols. The Scripture passage that we read today mentions several of those gods in particular. One of them was Molech. The worship of Molech involved sacrificing the lives of children, a sin that was particularly abhorrent to the God of Israel and most Israelites. It is because Solomon wastes his good relationship with God that he falls out of favor in God’s eyes.

By contrast, the Gospel text for today offers us the story of the Syrophoenician woman who begs for Jesus to expel a demon from her daughter. Her persistence wins out in the end, and Jesus does as the woman has asked. Jesus recognizes her persistence as the beginnings of faith when she mentions that “even the dogs eat of the scraps that fall from the table.”

The stories of both David and Solomon, two men who had been favored by God but who eventually sinned against God’s commandments, and of the story of the Syrophoenician woman are a contrast that should be helpful for us as we live out the demands of our faith. We have been greatly blessed by the fact that if we err, we know that God will forgive us. The great season of Lent is almost upon us, a time when we turn back to the Lord and prepare to renew our promises at the great Easter vigil. Let us remember the good things that we have so that we will not let them go bad.