The Just One Because of His Faith Will Live

27th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4

How long, O LORD?  I cry for help

 but you do not listen!

 I cry out to you, "Violence!"

 but you do not intervene.

 Why do you let me see ruin;

 why must I look at misery?

 Destruction and violence are before me;

 there is strife, and clamorous discord.

 Then the LORD answered me and said:

 Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,

 so that one can read it readily.

 For the vision still has its time,

 presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;

 if it delays, wait for it,

 it will surely come, it will not be late.

 The rash one has no integrity;

 but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.

The Prophet Habakkuk is unique among the minor prophets. Whereas all other minor prophets, with the exception of Jonah, give oracles of the Lord, Habakkuk’s book presents his honest dialogue with the Lord as he struggles to understand the Lord’s apparent inaction. The book is difficult to date with certainty, but it is clear that it was written sometime before the Babylonian exile began around 597 B.C. The incursion of Babylonian forces into the Promised Land is at the heart of Habakkuk’s distress. 

How does Habakkuk respond? In short, he prays. His entire book, that is all three chapters of it, is structured around two questioning prayers of anguish and impatience and one prayer for mercy during times of divine judgment. Our reading skips over several verses of his first prayer; you may take comfort in reading those verses and seeing that a biblical prophet prayed in such an honest and open way. In the end, when he does not understand the events he experiences, the prophet turns to the Lord with all the emotions he feels. Habakkuk advises us to trust in the Lord’s promises even when they do not seem to be coming true: “the just one, because of his faith, shall live.” By the end of this short book, he has wrestled with the problem of an all-powerful and all-good Lord allowing bad things to happen, and he is convinced that the Lord will ultimately deliver justice to everyone. The Lord is faithful, and so we must be faithful as well.

What about in your own life? What are the great injustices you have faced and perhaps still face? Why does he let you see ruin and look on misery? We cannot always, or even often, understand the good that the Lord is working through the bad that we see, and Habakkuk does not ultimately give us an answer to these things. Despite his frustrations, he does still end his book with the acclamation: “God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s feet, he makes me tread upon my high places” (3:19). When you feel weighed down by the injustices of life and grow tired of the Lord’s seeming inaction, hold on to him as your strength and trust in his promises. One day, he will enable you to dance upon the heights.