Our Venerable Father Leo, Bishop of Catania.
Great Fast Day 9. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Sixth Hour – Isaiah 5:7-16. Vespers – Genesis 4:8-15. Proverbs 5:1-15.
Read Isaiah 5:7-16
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
In this passage, Isaiah takes the people of Judah to task for several sins, including the unnecessary accumulation of wealth and resources. When he criticizes the people for joining “house to house” and “field to field,” he probably has in mind a violation of a specific commandment in the Law of Moses. The Torah gave instructions for the people of Israel who were about to take possession of the Promised Land: they must mark each division of the land for individual families with marker stones, and those stones must never be moved. That way, if a family sold its land to pay a debt, the markers would serve as a permanent reminder of the original and intended owners – and when the Jubilee year came (every fifty years, according to the prescriptions of the Law), every section of land would revert to the family that had originally received it as a ‘heritage.’
Certainly, this looks like an ancient social safety net – a family can gain or lose wealth for a period of time, but eventually there will be a general economic reset. But it might be more than that. Israel was supposed to be a just society, and this may have been part of its training in that justice. It was also meant to be a society, rather than a collection of individuals – and Isaiah criticizes the rich who “are left to live alone in the midst of the land” for alienating themselves from their fellows. Finally, the land that the Jewish people received was a sign of the merciful covenant of God, which would never be taken away. All this reminds us of what the Church is supposed to be: not a group of anonymous individuals but a real society, a community that knows, collectively and individually, what it has received from God: a lasting covenant that He will never forsake.