Today's readings place side by side a prophet's diagnosis of inner dividedness and Christ's strange command to seek only "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" — a pairing that, read psychologically, opens onto the question of where within ourselves we must begin the work of transformation. These reflections treat scripture as a map of interior states, reading vineyard, king, apostle, and "lost sheep" as elements of one's own inner landscape rather than historical or institutional categories. The aim is not theology but a kind of practical phenomenology of the divided self and the conditions under which it might become whole.
First reading
Hosea 10:1-3,7-8,12
Israel is an empty vine, he brings forth fruit unto himself: according to the multitude of his fruit he hath increased the altars; according to the goodness of his land they have made goodly images.
Their heart is divided; now shall they be found faulty: he shall break down their altars, he shall spoil their images.
For now they shall say, We have no king, because we feared not the LORD; what then should a king do to us?
As for Samaria, her king is cut off as the foam upon the water.
The high places also of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be destroyed: the thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars; and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us.
Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.
Gospel
Matthew 10:1-7
And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.
Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother;
Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphaeus, and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus;
Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter you not:
But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
And as you go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
— Interpretation —
Let us begin with Hosea’s extraordinary image: “Israel is an empty vine, he brings forth fruit unto himself.”
One must sit with this. An empty vine — and yet it brings forth fruit. How can a vine be empty and fruitful at once? Because the fruit it produces feeds only itself. The vine is closed. It is a circle that goes nowhere. The more fruit it produces, the more altars it builds, the more images it erects — all to itself, for itself, from itself.
This is a precise description of a certain inner state that every honest person can recognize. We may be enormously productive. We may build elaborate structures of belief, of identity, of accomplishment. We may multiply our activities and our commitments. And the whole of it may be empty — a vine bringing forth fruit unto itself — because it all circulates within the same closed system of self-reference. Nothing enters from above. Nothing reaches any part of us that is genuinely new. The fruit feeds the same self that produced it.
And then the prophet says the essential thing: “Their heart is divided.”
Here we touch the central problem. A divided heart does not mean a heart torn between two obvious choices, as we might ordinarily think. It means something far more interior. It means that the part of us that could receive higher influence is separated from the part that acts in life, and neither knows the other. We live, as it were, in one room of a house that has many rooms, and the door between them is not merely closed but forgotten. The heart is divided not by conflict but by ignorance — by a kind of sleep in which each part of us functions without reference to the whole.
Now observe what follows from this dividedness: “For now they shall say, We have no king, because we feared not the LORD; what then should a king do to us?”
When the heart is divided, there is no ruling principle. There is no king. And the remarkable psychological truth captured here is that in this state, a person does not merely lack a king — they cannot even see what a king would be for. “What then should a king do to us?” The question is asked in genuine bewilderment. When one lives entirely in the mechanical self, the idea of an inner authority, a unifying consciousness that could govern the whole of one’s being, seems not only absent but pointless.
This is the state of the fallow ground. Ground that has never been broken. Ground that is hard, compacted, sealed against rain.
And so Hosea says: “Break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.”
The fallow ground is not barren earth. It is earth that has never been opened. It has the capacity to receive — but it has not yet been made ready. The breaking up of fallow ground is painful. It is the work of self-observation, of seeing one’s own mechanicalness, of suffering the shock of recognizing that the vine one has so carefully tended brings forth fruit unto itself alone.
Now turn to the Gospel. Christ calls twelve disciples and gives them power — power against unclean spirits, power to heal. And then he gives them a strange restriction: “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter you not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Read externally, this seems parochial, exclusionary. But read as inner instruction, it becomes something quite different and intensely practical.
The “lost sheep of the house of Israel” are those parts of oneself that once knew something, that once belonged to a higher understanding, but have wandered away and become lost. They are not foreign territory — they are one’s own neglected capacities for attention, for feeling, for conscience. The Gentiles, in this inner reading, represent what is wholly external, wholly identified with life, what has never had any contact with higher meaning. One cannot begin there. One must begin with what is lost but recoverable — with the parts of oneself that can still be reached, still recognize the voice that calls.
“The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Not far off. Not earned through the empty vine’s endless self-production. At hand — which means here, now, in this moment of broken ground, in this act of turning toward what has been lost within oneself.
The fallow ground and the lost sheep are the same thing, seen from two directions. One image asks us to open. The other asks us to seek. Both require that we stop producing fruit unto ourselves and allow something to enter from beyond the closed circle of what we already are.
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
Scripture: King James Version
