Jeremiah 20:10-13 Romans 5:12-15 Matthew 10:26-33
There's not much Good News in today's Gospel, if we are honest with ourselves. True, I can pick out one or two highlights, focus on them and ignore the rest. It is nice to think that every hair on my head has been counted, for example, that I am valued by God.
But then one can do the opposite and quickly discover that pieces of “Bad News” significantly outnumber the highlights here. Jesus seems to ask of his disciples things that are either extremely uncomfortable or downright terrifying. And the command “do not be afraid” rings out like a refrain throughout.
“Everything now hidden will be made clear.” Well, we'd rather that at least some of the things now hidden remained hidden, especially our own secret sins and evil thoughts. “Proclaim from the house-tops”? Most of us feel uncomfortable with the very idea of preaching the Gospel openly, to the unbelieving masses of humanity out there. Indifference and ridicule are enough to put us off. The slightest possibility of being hurt, let alone killed in the process, fills our hearts with dread so natural that it seems almost cruel to say “do not be afraid of them”.
And if that's not bad enough, the stakes couldn't be higher. Our ultimate fate will be decided on this basis, we are told. Only those who can rise to these extremely high standards of faith and courage will be saved, it would seem. The fact that the Father knows, that He values our lives, doesn't improve our situation much. And Jesus tells us to fear the Father and to fear Hell. We are trapped in the no-man's-land, between two great opposing forces. The liturgy rightly suggests the prophet Jeremiah as our “patron saint” here! Where is the Good News in all this?
Well, first of all “what is now hidden” has nothing to do with us and our (mostly petty) sins and vices, with our little secrets. “What is now hidden” is the Word of God, of course, His Kingdom – not of this world but nevertheless in it. Most of us are not asked to preach on the streets. We proclaim the Kingdom, we make it visible, by acting in accordance with its hidden rules. In fact, assisting at Mass is one of the better ways of doing so. Opposition from people who don't believe and therefore cannot understand these rules is to be expected.
Secondly, God's kingdom may not be of this world, and therefore remains largely invisible, but still it is the more powerful of the two. Though it doesn't look like it now, we are on the winning side, so to speak, “those who are with us are more than those who are with them” as the prophet Elisha once famously stated. “The Lord is at my side, a mighty hero,” says Jeremiah, and that gives him the strength to stand alone, to go against the grain, to resist social pressures.
But even that can't be all. The prophet knew it and still found plenty of scope for bitterness about his overall situation. And quite right, we have to admire his honesty. In a famous passage immediately preceding what we have heard in the first reading, he speaks of being seduced and then overpowered by God. “You have seduced me, O Lord, and I was seduced, you have overpowered me and you have prevailed.” The language is very daring, it could even be said to suggest rape. The Word of God is like a burning fire within Jeremiah now, the prophet cannot hold it in. It was forcefully implanted in him, as it were, like an unwanted pregnancy. “God the mighty warrior” tricks Jeremiah and then uses him as bait. He puts the prophet out there to lure his opponents into a trap. Or at least so it often seems to the poor man himself. No wonder he has conflicting feelings about it, to put it mildly. He sings to the Lord and praises Him at one time and then immediately curses the day on which he was born: “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?”
The language employed by Jesus is very different, and perhaps here lies the greatest piece of Good News for us today. Jesus does not present himself as a strong man, a seducer who overpowers first his future allies and then his enemies. Instead, he whispers into our ears at night like a true lover, the Bridegroom of the Song of Songs: “what I say to you in the dark... what you hear in whispers”... Consequently, what is demanded of us is not strength born out of fear, rooted in the defeat inflicted on us by the Lord himself, nor some feats of extreme courage based on an even greater fear of God. Instead, we are simply asked to live out the love which we experience deep within our hearts, to use the courage and confidence that comes from being chosen and loved by Christ.
Finally, if we are honest, in our lives of faith we probably oscillate somewhere between Jeremiah's bitter moments and the high Christian mysticism based on the call to an intimate union with Christ. Maybe that's the final piece of Good News then – Jeremiah was still a great prophet. We too don't have to have it all worked out in order to be God's witnesses, in order to “declare ourselves for Jesus in the presence of men” and so be saved. The “double life” that Jeremiah led was not hypocrisy, it is simply the human condition, it is the fate of the chosen ones.
DSP