The Church’s first scripture for today is an excerpt from the Old Testament Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.
Jeremiah proclaimed the Lord’s word of truth in the dark days prior to the terrifying events of 587 BC. Remember, it was in the year 587 BC that a dreadful apocalypse overcame the Israelites as the Kingdom of David came to a horrific end and the Israelites were scattered, enslaved and exiled by the Babylonian Empire. All that the Israelites had known and loved was stripped away. Their faith in God was shaken to the foundations. Bereft of king, temple, land; the holy city of Jerusalem a ruin; even the divine presence was felt more as a crushing absence and disappointment, rather than a consolation and hope. And so, the Israelites entered into the shadowlands, longing for a deliverance that always seemed postponed and unfulfilled.
Jeremiah foresaw all this and warned the Israelites that the dark days were coming. The people scorned Jeremiah and treated him with contempt. In the midst of the harsh refusals of Israelites, Jeremiah lamented his mission as a prophet, doubted his call. And in the midst of his anxiety, the Lord reminded him that his call as a prophet was irrevocable and his mission was necessary. Jeremiah’s call, his vocation, and his mission were not merely career choices, but the will of the Lord.
This is a perennial biblical insight, one that a culture like ours, so enamored with the ideology of personal choice and freedom to do what we want find odious or perplexing. But this is where the biblical vision challenges the dogmatic assumptions of our culture, insisting that however we think the world should be, God has another way.
The lesson in this scripture passage from the Prophet Jeremiah is that meaning and purpose happen to us when God’s will and our will coincide. Standing athwart God’s will always brings with it great terrors.
This does not mean our lives will be easy or free from suffering if only we do what God asks, but we will have lives that will be redemptive, both for ourselves and for others and the sacrifices we make for the sake of love will bear fruit for generations to come.
Jeremiah would not live to see the truth of his words fulfilled, but beyond his life, his words of truth, his witness, scorned and rejected in his own time, would be a light in the dark and become the means through which the Israelites would come rediscover the meaning and purpose of their lives and their mission.
The other lesson in this concerns the Church. Remember, the Church reverences and proclaims the Old Testament not as a history lesson, but as a means of understanding ourselves and our mission as Christians. The Church is made by Christ a new Israel and thus in our lives the great story of the Bible is continuing. The Church turns to the story of the Israelites in the past so as to better understand the story of the Church in the present.
And the specific lesson for the Church in today’s scripture from the Old Testament is that the power of prophecy has passed into Church and it is the Church that now has the mission of Jeremiah- to speak the Lord’s word of truth. This mission is not just to hector people about their faults and failings, but it will make the Church hard to take and unpopular. It is not the mission of the Church to accommodate the world, but to change the world. It is not the mission of the Church to be successful in a worldly understanding of success, but to be faithful and to be holy. It is not the Church’s mission to tell us what we want to hear, but to declare to us, as Jeremiah did to the Israelites, the truth of the word of the Lord.
Our second scripture is one of the most memorable in all the Bible- an excerpt from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, his great meditation on love.
This scripture is an option for the scriptures proclaimed at the Wedding Mass, and it is in this context that most of us will receive it. Thus, the association often made with the Apostle’s words are romantic and sentimental.
But St. Paul did not write these words with romance of sentiment in mind. He wrote them for a Christian community that was tearing itself apart with acrimony, divisiveness, and cruelty. The words are meant as a solemn teaching regarding how Christians should live and what the Church should manifest to the world.
Who would be convinced of the Christian proclamation of the love of God in Christ if what they encounter in Christians is a community prone to tear one another apart?
Acrimony and divisions often overtake Christians because we seek to use the Church for purposes other than what Christ wants. We forget or simply ignore that the Church is not a company in which we hold shares. Nor is the Church ours to do whatever we want in whatever manner that pleases us.
Instead, the Church is Christ’s and how we relate to one another in the Church is an expression of what our relationship with Christ really and truly is. If we construe the Church as our personal property or seek to force our opinions, ideologies, and political preferences as the conditions for our own or other people’s identity and mission, the Church may continue to exist, even become prosperous, but it will not be Christ’s Church, and it will quickly become a loveless husk of its true form. Righteousness without mercy. Truth without love. Using the Church as a means to our own ends. In all these ways, we subvert the Church and become ourselves the means to Church’s destruction.
It is to Christians, who through acrimony, ideology, and divisiveness make the Church something other than the Church Christ intends, that St. Paul addresses his words about love. They are not, meant to evoke romance or cajole us with sentimentality. His words are meant to cut into our hearts and instill in us a desire to repent.
In his Gospel, the Lord Jesus proclaims the Lord’s word of truth to his own people and his people respond by refusing his word and seeking to destroy him.
The people are stirred to anger because Christ the Lord tells them what they don’t want to hear, he challenges their assumptions about what God wants. Secure in their pride that they have figured God out, they are outraged to hear Christ proclaim to them that God has other plans and purposes that do not fit into their narrowness and challenge their own sense of how God should act.
Specifically, what Christ tells them is that God intends, through Christ, to create a new kind of Israel, an Israel that will reach out to and include even those people that the Israelites consider to be enemies or unworthy outsiders. God wills to offer to the Israelites and the world the possibility of knowing him in a new kind of Israel that we know as the Church. This vision offends many, secure in the assumption that God would deal with the enemy and the outsider, not by redeeming them, but by destroying them.
Christ proclaims that God has another plan.
And there is the lesson. We so often think we know what God in Christ wants and then he surprises us by revealing that what he wants is what we did not consider to be possible. In this moment we are faced with a decision- acceptance of God’s will or making our own will into a false god. What will be our decision? Our will or Christ’s will?
God’s will or our own?
Father Steve Grunow 