Wednesday of the 13th Week of Ordinary Time
Seek good, and not evil, That you may live; And so the Lord, the God of Armies, will be with you, As you say. Hate evil, love good, And establish justice in the courts. It may be that the Lord, the God of Armies, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph."
I hate, I despise your feasts, And I can't stand your solemn assemblies. Yes, though you offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat animals. Take away from me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like rivers, And righteousness like a mighty stream.
"Hear, my people, and I will speak. Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God.
I don't rebuke you for your sacrifices. Your burnt offerings are continually before me. I have no need for a bull from your stall, Nor male goats from your pens.
For every animal of the forest is mine, And the livestock on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the mountains. The wild animals of the field are mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you, For the world is mine, and all that is in it. Will I eat the meat of bulls, Or drink the blood of goats?
But to the wicked God says, "What right do you have to declare my statutes, That you have taken my covenant on your lips, Since you hate instruction, And throw my words behind you?
When he came to the other side, into the country of the Gergesenes, two people possessed by demons met him there, coming out of the tombs, exceedingly fierce, so that nobody could pass that way. Behold, they cried out, saying, "What do we have to do with you, Jesus, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?" Now there was a herd of many pigs feeding far away from them. The demons begged him, saying, "If you cast us out, permit us to go away into the herd of pigs."
He said to them, "Go!"
They came out and went into the herd of pigs; and behold, the whole herd of pigs rushed down the cliff into the sea and died in the water. Those who fed them fled and went away into the city and told everything, including what happened to those who were possessed with demons. Behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus. When they saw him, they begged that he would depart from their borders.
There's a thread running through all three of these readings, and it's worth pulling on. God is not impressed by performance.
Amos delivers this message with real heat. The people of Israel are showing up to their religious festivals, making their offerings, singing their songs — and God says, essentially, *stop*. Not because worship is wrong, but because their worship had become a kind of cover story. They were going through the motions while injustice ran unchecked in the streets. The liturgy had become a way of feeling good about themselves without actually being transformed by what they claimed to believe.
Psalm 50 echoes this. Notice how God isn't asking for more sacrifice — God doesn't need anything from us. What God wants is integrity. The alignment between what we say and what we do, between the covenant we claim and the life we actually live.
Then we arrive at the Gergesenes, and something unexpected happens. The townspeople watch Jesus cast out two men who had been living in tombs, tormented, dangerous, cut off from community — and the response is to ask Jesus to *leave*. The healing disrupted the economy. The pigs are gone. The familiar disorder, as terrible as it was, had become manageable. Real transformation, it turns out, can be unsettling.
And here's where all three readings press on us together: authentic faith costs something. It costs us our comfortable performances, our managed religion, our tolerance for injustice when fixing it would be inconvenient. Justice rolling like a river isn't a gentle image — rivers reshape the land they move through.
On this ordinary Wednesday, consider what corners of life have become performance rather than transformation.
- Where might we be substituting religious routine for genuine conversion? - What healing in our lives or communities are we quietly asking Jesus to move away from because it's too disruptive? - What would it look like, concretely today, for justice to roll like water through one relationship or decision?