“What is good?  Do the right, love goodness and walk humbly with God.”  This text from the Prophet Micah is one of the most frequently cited texts of the Hebrew Scriptures.  But before that final sentence of today’s first reading the Prophet Micah tells us that God wants a legal hearing (a court trial) on human response to Divine compassion. 

“My people” the Lord begins His legal brief, “what have I done to you, or how have a wearied you?”

The Church puts these words in Jesus’ mouth, in a meditation that was written to be sung during the veneration of the Cross during the Liturgy on Good Friday. In that liturgy, as the members of the assembly approach the cross and ponder its meaning we hear the voice in the background singing “what have I done to you or in what have I wearied you, that you repay me this way.” 

In mid-summer liturgy we are called to examine our lives, our choices, our actions in the demanding light of Jesus’ legal brief:  Think of all I have done for you and answer me.  He invites you and me to consider the ways we have failed our God who has never failed us. 

The Gospel reading from Matthew starts with the faith leaders of the people demanding a sign from Jesus that what he does is from God.   “Only the sign of Jonah will we be given,” Jesus retorts “three days and nights in the earth between death and resurrection.”  Remember the Jonah story is about the call to the wicked people of Nineveh to repent before God destroys them (which they deserve).  Will we see the sign?  Will we hear the call to repentance from Micah, or a more contemporary prophet like Pope Francis?  Will we understand that we are destroying our earth, neglecting the hungry, ignoring the sick poor, identifying people in a hierarchy of value by the color of their skin or their cultural social status? 

Will you, like Teresa of Avila, (one of the great mystics of the Church) come around a corner and encounter Jesus looking at you with sadness because of the time, gifts, even life, that you have wasted?  Will I, like Peter, deny that I even know Jesus when he has begged me to stay faithful just for one night?

In this year of COVID, racism, the overheated tundra, famine and many other terrible responses and choices, it is time for a course correction for each one of us.  Today’s liturgy provides a powerful script:

“What is good?  Do the right . . .  love goodness. . .  and walk humbly with God”

“My people, what have I done to you or how have I wearied you?  Answer me.”