12th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2023

Jeremiah was one of the few prophets who told us about himself, usually in accounts he wrote of his struggles with God. The passage from today’s Reading is typical Jeremiah. The message he received from God to then relay to the “power-brokers” of the Kingdom of Judah was a threatening message. It was certainly anything but popular.

His prophetic faithfulness brought him many influential adversaries and rendered him vulnerable to constant criticism and danger. He turned to God for protection — indeed for more than protection. As we heard today, his prayer to his God was: “Let me see the vengeance you will take on them, for I have committed my cause to you”.

Did God hear his prayer? Jeremiah did not yet realise that there is no vengeance in the heart of God. Yet God allowed events to take their natural course, that so often finished up of itself in disaster and chaos for wrong-doers [and sometimes for everyone else as well]: what the Scriptures call “the Anger”, or “Gehenna” [often translated as “hell”]. Wrong-doing creates in this life its own retribution, its own suffering. Not so much “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth” on a one-to-one level, as a corporate suffering for all the members of a culture that unquestioningly accepts such behaviour as normal. Inter-cultural violence is what regularly feeds the nightly TV News channels and everyone seems to assume is "regrettably inevitable".

God did hear Jeremiah’s prayer, but in a roundabout way. God nourished Jeremiah’s personal integrity, his strength of character, the supportive depth of his personal relationship with God, even, perhaps, his inner peace. But, then, God’s ways are certainly not our ways.

In his letter to the Romans, St Paul wrestled with a similar problem. How does God deal with the world’s evil? In today’s passage, Paul referred to the disastrous experience of generalised evil as “death”. And it is not a bad term. We are all so inherently accustomed to it that we hardly notice it. But it saps our peace, our energy, our harmony and mutual support. We walk around at least “half-dead” — without realising it. It is like the spiritual equivalent of living in a hopelessly smog-affected city, or like living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bombs.

Paul put it well: "Sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned”. But then he proclaimed the good news: “If it is certain that through one man’s fall so many died, it is even more certain that divine grace, coming through the one man, Jesus Christ, came to so many as an abundant free gift.”

God deals with the world’s sin through Jesus, particularly by Jesus’ radical re-defining of the issue of power. Our sense of power is based on human competitiveness, leading to the need to dominate in order to survive; and on it goes inexorably to hostility and violence. Jesus challenged us from the first moment he was born — with the power of a baby. As he came to adulthood, his power became the power of his personal integrity. As he began teaching, he explicitly warned his disciples to keep away from the unredeemed concept of power as dominance and insisted that “anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first must be your slave.” Loving our enemies is possibly the neatest way to disarm them. The message of Jesus’ death illustrated his clearest expression of power — and his clearest, most powerful, reversal of sin.

Yet how often in our world do we look for signs of God’s care in examples of God’s dominance over nature or over people, rather than look instead for the truly transforming but hidden and gentle action of God in people’s minds and hearts?