+ If you recall, this is a continuation of last Sunday’s gospel
passage: Jesus
has just selected a very cogent passage from Isaiah as his first scriptural
proclamation, a passage about the One
sent by God, to bring glad tidings to
the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives: now this is meant to be very glad tidings to the very spiritually poor, and liberty to
the hopelessly enslaved!
And then he looks around and
says: right here, right now, by my very
reading of this passage, it is fulfilled by me in your hearing it! And then
everything reverberates! First some praise! Ah!
He speaks well! Some were amazed at what they heard; but then most get to
the bottom line: hey, isn’t this [just]
the son of Joe Jacobson (Joseph our neighbor), who lives not far from here??
Hey, Jesus, do here what we hear you have been doing all around the countryside
– all those signs and apparent wonders! You are not going to make fools of us!
Prove yourself for us now!
But then Jesus rather calmly
makes what has become the classic statement: no prophet is accepted in his own native place, even if great signs and
wonders are done or left undone! Then, the formerly adoring crowd rose up, drove him out of town and led
him to the top of a cliff from which they intended to hurl him: for being
an outrageously controversial figure! But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away. It was not his time
to lay all his cards out on the table, so he simply walked away unnoticed!
When something entirely new
begins to happen, even if it has been foretold, it’s just not the same as the
foretelling – and people, in their fear and their insecurity, react in
defensive, irrational and illogical ways! And so it happened at Jesus’ “home
parish!” No wonder the call to ministry ought to be rightly billed as a
sometimes dangerous and hazardous profession!
Young Jeremiah of the first
reading today knows about such a call and such accompanying danger. He stands
as a prophet in his own right telling the people of God to repent, repent or
they will be destroyed (again). They do not repent, and Jerusalem is destroyed.
But Jeremiah is true to his vocation, true to his mission and he is rewarded by
God who praises his stick-to-it-iv-ness!
Jeremiah also stands as a
figure for Jesus – who would warn God’s people once again to repent – but would
himself do something about their rejection, their disobedience, their sin, by
dying in order to reconcile it! And he stands for us too, each in our own states
of life – who are called to be instruments of grace in the lives of others, so
that they hear the warning before it is too late! The warning is simply this: LOVE while you still can; love because you
have been loved by God; love because God’s love has saved you; love because it
is the only key to heaven! And you will be victorious, just as Jesus
himself was victorious, just as Jeremiah was victorious, and just as the very
last Apostle on earth will be victorious in announcing the GOOD NEWS of salvation
that is simply there for the belief in it!
O God,
you are our hope from our mother’s womb – you are our strength – you are our
joy!
No comments:
Post a Comment