4th.
Sunday (Year C)
(Jeremiah
1:4-5, 17-19; 1st. Corinthians 12:31 – 13:13; Luke 4:21-30)
In our
first reading it would seem that Jeremiah was somewhat frightened on being
given the role of prophet by the Lord:
The word
of the Lord came to me, saying: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew
you; before you were born I dedicated you; a prophet to the nations I appointed
you."
And,
despite his protestations of youth:
Ah, Lord GOD! I do not know how to speak. I am too young!"
he needed
to be most authoritatively told:
Prepare
yourself; stand up and tell them all that I command you. For I am the one Who today makes you a
fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of bronze, against the whole land:
against Judah’s kings and princes, its priests and the people of the land.
You can
appreciate therefore the traditional Catholic conviction that when God chooses
someone for a special work of whatever sort – and despite their own possible
misgivings and fears -- He always prepares and enables them to do that for
which He is choosing them.
Let us
now turn our attention to Jesus Himself coming to a public awareness and
acknowledgement of the task for which He had been sent by His Father:
The
Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to bring glad tidings
to the poor; He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of
sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free; and to proclaim a year
acceptable of the Lord.
But
Jesus’ Personal understanding of His calling must surely be judged
not simply by noting the words of Scripture which, after having read them,
Jesus declared that they were being fulfilled that very moment, but also by the
way He then set about to prepare Himself for the work before Him.
We are
told that, on ending the reading from the prophet, Jesus then went on to speak
in such a way that:
When the
people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove Him out of the town, and
led Him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl Him
down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away.
What a
contrast with those prophetic words He had just read!
But make
no bones about it, People of God, Jesus did not inspire such anger and
resentment by a slip of the tongue so to speak, or in an outburst of sudden
anger or irritation. Not at all! He appears to have been deliberately
provocative for a reason befitting Him Who as Lord was coming to His own and
finding them manifestly not as He would have them:
Surely
you will quote Me this proverb, 'Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here
in Your native place the things that we heard were done in
Capernaum.'" And He said,
"Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.”
To impugn
in such a way the personal pique of those present might have been deemed
enough, but no, Jesus went straight on to infuriate them further by attacking
their national pride:
Indeed, I
tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky
was closed for three and a half years, and a severe famine spread over the
entire land. It was to none of these that
Elijah was sent but only to a widow in
Zarephath, in the
land of
Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in
Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed
but only Naaman the Syrian.
Once
more, I want you to contrast the peace of that gentle mission of comfort and
salvation, foretold and expressed in those prophetic words accepted and
acknowledged by Jesus, with this deliberate ‘taking on’ of those of His hearers
whose personal pique had led them to overtly observe, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”,
before then going on to bluntly accuse His hearers as a whole for their
excessive national pride as Israelites as distinct from what should have been a
humble awareness of their true glory as a People chosen and prepared by God to
hear, reverence, and respond to, His most holy Word.
How are
such contrasting, indeed apparently contradictory, attitudes in Our Lord to be
reconciled? For reconciled they must be
if we are to have a true understanding and appreciation of Our Saviour, His
work for us, and our duties in His service.
Such a
reconciliation is not often sought because the problem is too frequently swept
under the carpet so to speak -- as for example, in this case -- by ignoring the
living activity of Jesus Himself and over-emphasizing the prophetic vision. Today, it is commonly imagined that people
ought to be cajoled by fellowship and sympathy into trying-out some version of
Christianity or perhaps even Christian Catholicism to test it -- as it were for
comfort and fit -- rather than their being made aware of the privilege of being
called and offered the opportunity to give themselves in self-surrender and
gratitude to the inspiration of God’s
promises of forgiveness and fulfilment together with the challenge of walking
daily with Jesus, along His way of the Cross, in the power of His most Holy
Spirit.
Jesus
always maintained the comprehensive attitude: His words and actions could be
hard as well as gentle: He would help but never cajole, He wanted obedience not
popularity; for He had come to redeem not to excuse, to gently raise human beings
above their present limitations and
weaknesses
– call to mind His dealings with Jeremiah recorded for us in our first reading
-- not to smother their aspirations or paralyse their efforts by oodles of very
human sympathy.
I have
come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! (Luke 12:49)
Do not
think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not
peace but the sword. For I have come to
set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's enemies will be those of
his household.' Whoever loves father or
mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more
than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever does not take up his cross and follow
after Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever
loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34-39)
Holiness
in Jesus was absolutely and sublimely serious: not to be manifested by carefully
chosen and publicly appreciable and acceptable tokens such as sympathetic
gestures or emotional words; for Him holiness was simply and solely, totally
and wholly, Personal: divine love,
burning charity towards His Father, expressed on earth by His absolute
dedication to His Father’s glory and the fulfilment of His Father’s will for
our salvation. We, however, so very
often, in order to fit Jesus into the weakness of our understanding and the
flabbiness of our presentation of holiness restrict the supreme fullness of His
work and words to what is easily digestible by all; popular sensitivities must
not be offended, worldly comfort and harmony should not in any way be
disturbed.
Today, as
St. Paul declared:
We know in part and we prophesy in part;
however,
we do this, not as a result of our innocent and truly human inadequacy before
the sublimely awesome yet wondrous reality of God, as confessed by Paul, but
knowingly and
wilfully
because we too often seek for what is ultimately worldly not heavenly, and this
procedure is supremely exemplified by the popular use and almost ‘canonization’
of the word ‘love’ originally used to translate that other, more Christian,
word: ‘charity’. Charity is divine,
being the life-flow between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We, in baptism and confirmation receive it as
a gift from God, a share in His way of loving, a share enabling us live as His
children, to form one Family to the glory of His Name, in the likeness of Jesus
by the power of the Spirit. Our
understanding of this Gift of Charity, however, has become twisted and demeaned
by repeated and increasingly cheap use of the translation, ‘love’, a word that
should be supremely honourable indeed as shown in Paul’s description of it – as
caritas, charity -- in our second
reading, but one which is blatantly open to and available for the blasphemous
justification of all kinds of degrading lust and licence which are essentially
unchristian.
People of
God, the devil once entered into open combat with Jesus in the desert after He
had received John’s baptism in the Jordan: that battle the devil lost and he
never forgot the experience, which is why he never enters into open conflict
with Jesus in the Church. However, he is
still and always the enemy and the deceiver, and so he prefers to have Jesus
proclaimed partially, insinuating here and omitting there, always and in every
way trying -- as the deceiver and liar that he is – to lead Christians astray
first of all, that he might ultimately destroy them. Today he continues his insinuations and in
that way seeks to destroy the image of Jesus in mankind by hiding the fullness
of the glory of the Lord or the majesty of the Son of Man in favour of a
sugary, plaster-cast, likeness meant to temporarily indulge human weaknesses at
the cost of blunting mankind’s divine potentialities. And his most useful
supporters are contemporary former Christians and government members seeking to
justify – by their use of Christian terminology -- themselves and their
policies which promote by means of ‘ersatz’ goodness (there is no right and
wrong, no power of evil, everything open and subject to human judgement) their
own desire to continue in popularity and power; and also all those of learning
who know
so much about things and so little about themselves, who know so much
about the experience of life and so little about its ultimate purpose, value, and fulfilment
that they think themselves able and justified to meddle in and with it.
Today,
People of God, we need to remember the words of God addressed to Jeremiah:
They will
fight against you, but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you
–oracle of the LORD.
Those are
words suited to our situation today.
We are
called to live in Mother Church in such a way as to be able to drink deeply of
the new wine that is hers in abundance; for our destiny as Catholics and
Christians in this world is not of this world, since its ultimate
fulfilment will be an eternal sharing in heavenly reality and divine fulfilment
… in Jesus, by the Spirit, for the Father.
Our ultimate destiny is the holiness of sharing in Divine Charity for
eternity. Today, it is popularly
thought, that holiness is some optional extra for Christians, that needs to be
popularized and promoted -- as being, on the whole, easy and rewarding -- when
dealing with people who have difficulty understanding how what is intangible
and invisible can be both truly real, and worth-their-while making a serious
effort to attain it.
We have,
therefore, as St. Paul said, to learn adult ways:
When I
was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child,
when I became a man, I put aside childish things;
and this
we can do only by looking once again at the whole Jesus. We must not allow ourselves to look at Him
through the world’s eyes which only see what they are wanted to see. We must see the fullness of Him and love Him
in that fullness: gentle and strong, understanding and demanding, inviting and
rejecting; totally devoted to us and totally opposed to the reality of sin.
We must
seek Him in the whole of the Scriptures not just in some few selected and
popular passages or quotes in the national press; we must understand Him in
line with the fullness of Mother Church’s witness to Him, and serve Him
according to the Spirit we received in baptism, not yielding to the clamour of
undisciplined human nature or the propensities of the sinful world.
Do not
work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you. For on Him the Father, God, has set His
seal.” So they said to Him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of
God?” Jesus answered and said to them,
“This is the work of God, that you believe in the One He sent.” (John 6:27–29)
Then we shall know fully, as we are fully
known.
