Her heads judge for reward, and her priests teach for hire, and her prophets divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? no evil can come upon us.
All Commentaries on Micah 3:11 Go To Micah 3
Jerome
AD 420
You are permitted, O priest, to “live,” not to luxuriate from the altar. “The mouth of the ox which treads out the corn is not muzzled.” Yet the apostle “abused not the liberty,” but “having food and raiment” was “thereby content,” laboring night and day that he “might not be chargeable to anybody.” And in his epistles he calls God to witness that he “lived reverently” and without avarice in the gospel of Christ. He asserts this too not of himself alone but of his disciples, that he had sent no one who would either ask or receive anything from the churches. But if in some epistles he expresses pleasure and calls the gifts of those who sent them the grace of God, he gathers not for himself but for the “poor saints at Jerusalem.” But these poor saints were those who of the Jews first believed in Christ and being cast out by parents, kinsmen and connections had lost their possessions and all their goods, the priests of the temple and the people destroying them. Let such poor receive. But if on plea of the poor a few houses are enriched and we eat in gold, glass and china, either let us with our wealth change our habit or let not the habit of poverty seek the riches of senators. What avails the habit of poverty while a whole crowd of poor longs for the contents of our purse? Wherefore, “for our sake” who are such, “who build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem by iniquity, who judge for gifts, give answers for rewards, divine for money,” and thereon claiming to ourselves a fictitious sanctity say, “Evil will not come upon us,” hear the sentence of the Lord which follows: “Zion and Jerusalem and the mountain of the temple”—that is, the temple of Christ—“shall” (in the consummation and the end, when “love shall grow cold” and the faith shall be rare) “be plowed as a field and become heaps as the high places of a forest,” so that where once were ample houses and countless ears of corn there should only be a poor cottage, keeping up the show of fruit which has no refreshment for the soul. .
