August 3, 18th Sunday in OT, Cycle A

For the English speaking crowd, one of our favorite hymns is a musical setting for Isaiah’s elegant words, “Come to the water.” The prophet reminds his hearers and readers that the “Water” is always free, given at no cost whatsoever. What does he mean? What was “costly religion” in his day? It was the competing religions. There was Baalism, the traditional religion of the area, a religion centered in how to get and keep wealth, or there was Dagonism, the religion of the Philistine neighbors to the west, which was the religion of power and how to get it and keep it; the religion of Egypt, with its mysteries that sought out the meaning of the heavens as it tried to secure an afterlife, was always tempting, and the religion of the Ammonite neighbors to the east, Molechism, was a religion of rage, vengeance and disrupting all order to one’s gain. We have those religions with us, today, too; now they bear different names, and some of them have co-opted the name of the Prince of Peace as their champion. But they always were, and they still are, terribly costly, not only to the practitioner, but to the whole society. Then, there was Torah, the “Water of Life,” teaching simple justice in the "here and now," there for all to read and to study–free of charge. And when one delves into the Scripture and finds one’s Life there, there is nothing that holds us back on our path to each other and to God, as Paul would say. Matthew’s Gospel wants to say to us that the teaching of Jesus is nourishing to the Nth degree...water of life and bread of life, and, it, too, is there, for free–at no cost, other than the time one must invest in studying it and learning to enter into it so as to embody it. So, what’s stopping us? Hmmmm.