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Thus saith the Lord: 19 And if ye be willing, and hearken to me, ye shall eat the good of the land: 20 but if ye be not willing, nor hearken to me, a sword shall devour you: for the mouth of the Lord has spoken this. 21 How has the faithful city Sion, once full of judgement, become a harlot! wherein righteousness lodged, but now murderers. 22 Your silver is worthless, thy wine merchants mix the wine with water. 23 Thy princes are rebellious, companions of thieves, loving bribes, seeking after rewards; not pleading for orphans, and not heeding the cause of widows. 24 Therefore thus saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, Woe to the mighty men of Israel; for my wrath shall not cease against mine adversaries, and I will execute judgement on mine enemies. 25 And I will bring my hand upon thee, and purge thee completely, and I will destroy the rebellious, and will take away from thee all transgressors. 26 And I will establish thy judges as before, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: and afterward thou shalt be called the city of righteousness, the faithful mother-city of Sion. 27 For her captives shall be saved with judgement, and with mercy. 28 And the transgressors and the sinners shall be crushed together, and they that forsake the Lord shall be utterly consumed. 29 For they shall be ashamed of their idols, which they delighted in, and they are made ashamed of the gardens which they coveted. 30 For they shall be as a turpentine tree that has cast its leaves, and as a garden that has no water. 31 And their strength shall be as a thread of tow, and their works as sparks, and the transgressors and the sinners shall be burnt up together, and there shall be none to quench them.
2:1 The word which came to Esaias the son of Amos concerning Judea, and concerning Jerusalem. 2 For in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be glorious, and the house of God shall be on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall come to it. 3 And many nations shall go and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will tell us his way, and we will walk in it: for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.
St. Basil the Great, guided by the same Holy Spirit who inspired the prophet, sees three levels of meaning in a single verse, verse 21: How has the faithful city Sion, once full of judgement, become a harlot! wherein righteousness lodged, but now murderers.
1. This verse is a prophecy that the murder of the Savior would take place in Jerusalem. St. Basil writes, “To what time do these charges refer, if not to that in which the city becoming ‘an evil and adulterous generation’, murdered the Righteousness that stooped from heaven and rested in her – Christ the Lord.”
In the time of the prophet Esaias, in the time of the Savior, and unto our own time, the city of Jerusalem, and the Holy Land of which she is the center, have never ceased to be the center of all history, for in Jerusalem the central act of all history – the saving Passion and life-giving Resurrection of the Lord – took place; in Jerusalem the Antichrist will have his throne, and to the Mount of Olives above Jerusalem the true Christ will return in glory to judge the living and the dead.
In our own time, “…the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not…(Rev. 3:9)” have transgressed the express will of God by defying His sentence of exile for their judicial murder of the God-Man, and they have established a false Israel in the land taken away by God Himself from their fathers for their sin of deicide. We must face this reality soberly, and we must read it carefully as one of the “signs of the times” which Our Savior commands us to observe. Surely it has apocalyptic significance, though we do not claim to understand its implications completely. We must, on the one hand, reject the heretical Judaizing and Zionist ideology adopted by certain heterodox Christian groups, but on the other hand we must eschew the sinful Jew-hatred of the neopagan false “Right” and false “Left.” We must not get caught up in the deceptive dialectic between these two false alternatives that has been engineered by the demons and their human agents. We do not define ourselves as Zionists or anti-Zionists: we are Orthodox Christians. We follow not a party or an ideology, but only our Master Christ, Who desires “that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” Our Savior wept over Jerusalem as He approached His saving Passion for our salvation. Let us weep as well, and pray for the grace to love with His divine love, to desire with His divine desire that none be lost, but that all men – Jew and Gentile – may be saved. Only the utmost purity of heart, characterized by the highest theological virtue – charity – will keep us safe from the wrath to come.
2. St. Basil also writes that verse 21 contains a lesson for our spiritual life: The city of Jerusalem which betrayed the Lord is an image of the soul whose unbelief leads to the sin of fornication. He says, “One must note that unbelief is the mother of fornication. For who that believes that God is everywhere and is present in everything that happens, attends to each action and observes the designs of our hearts, can admit a wicked thought or accomplish evil? But people hasten to unholy actions when they assume either that God does not perceive them, or that He does not care about what happens.”
Here St. Basil defines “unbelief” as assuming that God does not perceive our evil actions or that He does not care. This kind of unbelief is practical atheism, which has the same outcome as theoretical atheism: spiritual death. Very few people are theoretical atheists; most people say that they believe in God after some fashion. But because of our extreme worldliness, very few – sad to say, very few Orthodox Christians! – have a lively sense of God’s presence, the conviction of the mind and heart that He is watching our every action, hears our every word, and knows our every thought. Great Lent provides us with the ideal opportunity to escape this deadly state of insensibility and return to a life of conscious repentance, characterized by the fear of God and careful watchfulness over ourselves. We have so many instruments of repentance ready at hand: fasting, prayer, spiritual reading, acts of mercy, the amazing compunctionate services of Great Lent and Holy Week, confession and Holy Communion. Let us hasten to make good use of them before it is too late!
3. St. Basil also explains that this verse foretells that teachers of heresy will come, who will murder the souls of the faithful and tear them away from the New Sion – the New Testament Church – creating false churches that have fallen away from the true Faith to become spiritual harlots :
“Yet it is said sometime also about the Church (God forbid that this should be said about our Church!): How has the faithful city Sion become a harlot? when, rejecting the teaching of truth to which she was married from the very beginning according to the tradition of the Fathers who presented her a chaste virgin to one husband (II Cor. 11:2), she accepts the many and various seeds of doctrine from those who have defiled the sacredness of the sacraments and scatter abroad the tenets of impiety to the corruption of souls. It will then be justly said of her: How has the faithful city Sion become a harlot? For the holy angels, who are entrusted with the patronage of Churches, who have knowledge of the past and have the present in full view, will ask of them: How has the faithful city become a harlot? And because of her fornication she has assembled murderers, murderers not of bodies but of souls, men who through deceit and guile deprive of life those who are more simple; these men inflict mortal wounds upon souls with the word, as if with some sword, for they have been honed to plausibility by means of the wisdom of the world”.
The true Church, of course, will always exist in her original virginal purity of doctrine and action, but many local churches have fallen and are now falling into the state of spiritual adultery through accepting the plausible excuses of false teachers who teach not the wisdom of Christ, but rather teach the wisdom of this world. Plausible deniability is the stock in trade of the current leaders of “official Orthodoxy” who fall again and again into spiritual whoredom through the apostasy of ecumenism, and yet always have a new plausible explanation ready to hand, as to why their manifest and unrepentant heresy does not deprive them – and thereby their clergy and laity – of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Let the reader beware.
