Today’s Reading includes God’s visit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There, He planned to exterminate the people because of their immorality.
The first of the Two symbolic meanings of Sodom’s destruction. Most of us overlook that Sodom’s homosexuality was a sin that symbolized other sins. God also punished them for hurtful, destructive policies that included slavery, deficit spending, monetary devaluation, usury, abuse, and other hurtful policies summed up in the phrase “Idol-worship”, replacing God with some other source of guidance.
Today’s Reading is from Genesis, 18:16-33. In it, God and Abraham are discussing the destruction of Sodom. Excerpts follow and show the second of: Two symbolic readings of Sodom’s destruction.
. . . . the LORD remained standing before Abraham.
Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said:
“Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?
Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city;
would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it
for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing,
to make the innocent die with the guilty,
so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike!
Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”
The LORD replied,
“If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom,
I will spare the whole place for their sake.”But he (Abraham) still persisted:
“Please, let not my Lord grow angry if I speak up this last time.
What if there are at least ten there?”
He replied, “For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.”
Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said:
“Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?
Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city;
would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it
for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing,
to make the innocent die with the guilty,
so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike!
Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”
The LORD replied,
“If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom,
I will spare the whole place for their sake.”But he (Abraham) still persisted:
“Please, let not my Lord grow angry if I speak up this last time.
What if there are at least ten there?”
He replied, “For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.”
. . . . .
Now, let us compare Sodom with ourselves. We are filled with sin. Catholic Fundamentalism suggests: “We may estimate that 1440 people lived in Sodom. Fifty innocent people were among them. God promised to ‘spare the whole place for their sake.’ Finally, Abraham got God to agree that if there were only ten innocent people, ‘I will not destroy it’.”
. . . . .
Remembering Abraham, we say: “God, there are 1440 minutes in a day. I spend a lot of those minutes thinking unworthy, destructive thoughts. If I spend one fiftieth of those minutes asking You to save me, will You? If I spend a half an hour a day in prayer, begging for forgiveness, would You spare me from destruction?”
. . . . .
God agreed to save Sodom if fifty people out of our estimated population of 1440 were innocent. It is not unreasonable to assume that He would forgive us if we begged Him to forgive our transgressions for half an hour a day. What if we only spend ten minutes praying to be better, every day?
. . . . .
If the proportions are the same, and if the analogy holds, there is hope for each and every one of us to have an eternal joy in Heaven by sincerely asking God for His mercy and forgiveness ten minutes a day.
. . . . .
That is the second of Two symbolic meanings of Sodom’s destruction.
