NOTES for Hab 1:1-17

The fear of God, as we see, does not exclude the boldness with which Habakkuk asks the Creator his questions. To some they might have seemed impious, for one could view it as Habakkuk, by demanding an answer from the Lord, almost challenging Him. And yet He does not reject these questions and answers them. Here we unexpectedly discover that the Lord does not shut Himself off from us - He is ready to give answers to any of our hard questions, provided we are ready to hear and understand them. More than that, He not only wants us to grasp and accept His will, but also does not reject our desire to enter into dialogue with Him. In the end, it was He who endowed the human being with reason, and His gifts were given to us not so that we might let them rot in the far corner of the pantry.

It is another matter that human reason alone is not enough to comprehend the highest wisdom; trust in the One whose reason is immeasurably higher is necessary. For what the Lord reveals to us is often hard for our consciousness to assimilate. Trust in God is all the more necessary because the law on which the pious had relied until now is called powerless. The law, of course, did not thereby become untenable, but its constant violation greatly weakened the possibility of its full action. This will have to be paid for: in place of the old evil, already grown familiar, a new evil will be brought by the Chaldeans. In them, violators of the weakened law will encounter "elemental materialists" who worship only understandable earthly things. Their god is named as strength: they worship everything that serves to increase their power.

The pagan Chaldeans are compared to fishermen who catch people in a net and send them into slavery, and here we paradoxically recall Christ's call to be fishers of men, addressed to the Galilean fishermen. But those who agreed to be caught in the apostles' nets are, on the contrary, freed from the nets of sinful slavery.