Every family has an unofficial courtroom. It is usually the kitchen. Someone asks, "Who finished the ice cream?" Immediately, four people become constitutional lawyers. One argues there was hardly any left. Another insists the container was already suspiciously light. A third claims not to like that flavor, although witnesses have seen otherwise. The final person says, "Why are we always blaming people in this family?" which is generally understood as a confession.
Prophet Micah stages a courtroom too, but he calls unusual witnesses: the mountains and the age-old foundations of the earth. They have no opinions to protect and no grudges to settle. They simply stood there the whole time, watching.
Who Will Judge Us?
If the places around us could testify, what would they say about us? What would the kitchen table report about how we speak to the people we love most? What would the office hallway say about how we treat people with less authority than us? What would the car say about the version of us that shows up when no one else is in it?
The people in Micah’s time respond by asking what and how much God wants. More offerings? More sacrifices? Something extravagant? They imagine the problem is that they have not given God enough things. God says, in effect, “The problem is not what you have placed upon the altar. The problem is what you have become away from it.” Then prophet Micah collapses the whole matter into three lines: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. Short enough to fit on a fridge magnet. Nowhere near that easy to live.
Doing justice usually shows up in the moment you have leverage and choose not to use it. It's the manager who could let a mistake slide onto someone else's record and doesn't, instead has a personal conversation. It's returning a security deposit in full instead of inventing a reason to keep some of it. It's telling your kids the truth about who started the argument, even when it's the one you like better. Justice is what happens in the five seconds before you decide whether your advantage will cost someone else something.
Mercy's Role in Judgment
Loving mercy is harder than forgiving on paper. It's the choice not to drag an old fight into a new one, not to say "you always" when you mean "you did, once, three years ago." We want God to read our whole story before judging us, not just our worst chapter. Mercy extends that same courtesy to the people who live with us: the spouse who forgot one anniversary, the teenager who made one bad decision, the friend still working to make up for letting us down. Mercy doesn't erase what happened. It just refuses to let that one thing have the last word.
And then Micah says, "Walk humbly with your God." Humility is not self-deprecation. It is remembering that we do not see everything, know everything, or understand everyone. A humble person can say, "I was wrong." A humble person can listen without preparing a defense. It looks like admitting, you took the wrong exit instead of blaming the GPS, a small thing, but the same muscle you need for the big ones.
And perhaps that is the question these reading leaves us: If our homes, workplaces, and daily conversations were called as witnesses, what would they say? Would they say that we were always, right? Hopefully not. That would be unbearable. But may they say that we tried our best to be fair, that we were quicker to forgive, and that over time, walking with God slowly and imperfectly, made us gentler people to live with.
- Today’s Readings
- Father Boby's inspirational homily was recorded live during Mass at the Father Peyton Center this morning. You can view the Mass (and the Rosary at the 30-minute mark) on the Family Rosary YouTube page.
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