| Readings: | Jeremiah 20:10-13 |
| Date: | June 24-25, 2023, Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A |
Both our first reading today and the Gospel tell us of the hardships of being a prophet, and of God's accompaning them in their mission.
How many people here are officially prophets? If you have been baptized in the Catholic Church then you are a prophet. Week after week when we have a baptism during Mass, you have seen that after baptizing the new Catholics with the water that represents dying to Christ and rising then to new life in Christ, we anoint them with the holy Chrism and pray over them, “He now anoints you with sacred chrism so that you may remain in Christ, priest, prophet, and king, unto eternal life.” A prophet is one who speaks God’s word, who speaks God's truth. And as we hear today in both the first reading and the Gospel, doing that means a prophet's life is full of danger and discouragement. Anointing has been used in human rituals for millenia for people whose role in life requires courage, strength, and persistence: kings, knights, priests. Our sacraments continue that tradition, perhaps most explicitly in the Anointing of the sick. I would suggest that we missed the boat in not including anointing in the sacrament of Matrimony!
So we who are prophets by baptism would do well to listen to today's readings.
Poor Jeremiah. He is beset on every side with persecution and harassment. He is ordered by the priests not to prophesize; he scourged; he is thrown down a well and left to die; he is imprisoned; and finally he is dragged off to Egypt against his will to die in exile.
Jesus warns his disciples as he sends them off to proclaim the kingdom of God that he is sending them like sheep among the wolves, that they will be scourged, and all will hate them.
Both Jeremiah and Jesus speak of having the courage to face all these trials and persecutions because God is with them. But they express this sense of a God who is involved with, and concerned for, and protective of his prophets in quite contrasting ways.
Jeremiah proclaims a God who is a champion, in the sense of a military champion, one who defeats the enemies of his friends, putting them to shame and confusion. Jeremiah’s sense of the God who is with him is one of power and vengeance. Jesus talks of God who is with us as a parent, one who knows us intimately, and is aware of the smallest details of not only our body but of our hearts and minds.
I would suggest that we have to be very careful here. Language about God is very important because it is the result of how we think about God and at the same time it shapes how we think about God.
If we listen to Jeremiah’s description of God there is a danger we can cast God into the form of a human king or general who wages battle against other humans who attack us. We can start to think of God as favoring US, and being against THEM. Jeremiah is caught up in the closeness he feels to God in his trials, and uses that symbol of military champion to express this, and that awareness of God's presence is clearly influenced by the reality that Jerusalem is under military attack from the north. I say there is a danger here because this language can be used to justify all kinds of oppression and aggression against others.
And what about Jesus’ description of God as a caring parent? The danger here is that we cast God in the form of a male God because we get stuck on the word Father, when it is clear that God is neither male nor female. And this is danger because this particular misunderstanding has been used over and over again throughout history to devalue women, and to justify male oppression of females.
The symbols and analogies and metaphors that we use when we talk about God are not God. When we multiply the symbols and analogies and metaphors we can start to get a deeper sense of the mystery who is God but in the end the truest experience we have of God is the experience of being loved. For most of us, we experience this love from other humans. And that is the good news that we are called on, as prophets, to proclaim. We are to make God known the way Jesus did. Yes Jesus used many, many, symbols and analogies and metaphors but in the end he makes God known by loving us to death.
As you are sent forth as prophets, this God who is love is the one you are to speak of, and for. So fear no one. Make known this God who is love by loving those in your life, to death.