Israel’s Rebellion (14th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

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The book of Ezekiel chronicles the prophet Ezekiel’s calling to preach to the Kingdom of Judah during the final stage of their history, just prior to their final fall at the hands of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The reason for this fall, as the book explains, is that Judah had abandoned God’s law, embraced the idolatrous practices of the nations around them (including sacrificing their children to Molech), and placed their trust in their alliances with foreign powers such as Egypt, rather than God. These same problems afflicted the northern kingdom of Israel, which had fallen back in 722 BC under the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Now Judah, was about to fall to the same mistake.

However, God was not about to simply let them go their own way. Before inflicting His punishment, He first warns the people to repent of their sins by sending them prophets. Ezekiel was one of the last of the pre-exilic prophets, whose job it was to give Judah its final warning before their inevitable punishment overcame them. He is elsewhere likened to a watchman whose task is to warn of impending danger, and all who fail to heed the warning are responsible for their own lives (Ezekiel 33:1-9). The purpose of this is so that Judah would have no excuse for failing to obey God. As the final verse indicates, regardless of whether they obey or not, they cannot feign ignorance, as God’s command to repent was made clear to them.

From this, we learn that God always gives sufficient warning to people when they are going astray from Him. When God judges individuals or nations for their sin, they cannot feign ignorance, as they are accountable to what they know, either from natural revelation, or from explicit written revelation. But the sin is greater on the part of those who have greater revelation from God. As Jesus warned the Jewish cities He preached in, their lot would be worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah, because they heard God’s word directly from Him, and still they rejected it (Matthew 11:20-24). Likewise, we are under greater judgment if we turn our backs from what we know, since we have no excuse.

J. Luis Dizon