NOTES for Mal 2:1-12

The second chapter of the book of the prophet Malachi begins with a fresh rebuke to Israel's unfaithful priests, no longer concerned with carelessness in offering sacrifices. The Lord says that ‘the priest's lips should preserve knowledge, and people seek the law from his mouth’; teaching the people is therefore precisely the duty entrusted to the priesthood. In Malachi's time, however, the priests not only disregarded this duty but themselves set an example of breaking the law. In response, the Lord says that for human beings in general and for the Levitical priesthood in particular, the only source of dignity is doing the Creator's will. The direct logical conclusion is that when the covenant with the ‘descendants of Levi’, with Israel's priesthood, is broken, humiliation and disgrace naturally fall to the unfaithful priesthood.

According to the prophet, the priesthood leads the people astray chiefly through ‘partiality in matters of the law’. The Lord had charged the priests with interpreting the law, explaining its essence and resolving disputed questions in accordance with its spirit and with their own experience of life and prayer. Instead, the priests of Israel behaved as though someone had appointed them guards deciding what could or could not be permitted on the basis of the influence and standing of each person who came to them with a question. In practice, this meant that the noble and the rich received permission not to observe particular provisions of the law, while the poor and insignificant were required to fulfil them. Behind this practice lies an attitude to the Lord's law as optional human regulations rather than a revelation of the Almighty's will for people's salvation. Here lies the root of what the Lord Jesus Christ called ‘burdens hard to bear’; here a peculiar spiritual corruption invades religious life, eating away at the very foundation of human life — people's relationship with God. For the priests justified their opinions by appealing to the Creator's will, supposedly expressed in the law.

The prophet then turns to people's relationships with one another, which ought to be founded on their brotherhood before God. This is one of those rare passages in the Old Testament where the prophet dares to call God not the Creator and Ruler but the Father of humankind. ‘Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?’, Malachi asks. For him, God is the One who pours forth life to all people, from whom every person's soul has its origin. The prophet feels keenly humanity's calling to likeness to God, and therefore every act of cruelty and unfaithfulness towards others is for him a renunciation of that calling. In the same way, for Malachi people's direct bond with their Creator implies above all faithfulness in worshipping the One God. Pagan cults and a pagan attitude to the faith of the fathers are therefore perceived as a betrayal of life itself.