Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time C

August 18, 2013

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Today's readings invite us to explore one of the most perplexing issues for Christian people: dealing with conflict, division and anger.

I know, from my earliest years in family and school, I was taught that good boys and girls always get along, are always well-liked and never get angry and fight with one another.

Having five younger brothers gave my mom and dad plenty of opportunities to remind me of this!

Well, it seems clear from today's readings that Jeremiah and Jesus were not "good boys."

Jesus and Jeremiah both offended many good religious people of their societies.

Jesus speaks of bringing divisions even within family

Jeremiah was put down the cistern by people who thought they knew God's will better than he did.

The people who opposed Jesus and Jeremiah were not all bad; they, for the most part, had strong religious convictions and were sincere in what they believed.

They just simply believed that Jesus and Jeremiah were wrong about God!

And, like many of us today, they would rather "shoot the messenger" than listen to what might prove to be an unwelcome, unpleasant and /or difficult message

Just look at what made them angry at Jesus and Jeremiah:

Jesus challenged beliefs about how to know God.

He preached that God was forgiving, not vengeful

Jeremiah advocated surrendering Jerusalem to the Babylonians, saying God's will would be worked through the enemy.

Just think how that way of thinking would go over today in the U.S. where patriotism is often a stronger value, even among Christians, than the Gospel

The thing is, people who are very sure about religious matters often do not want to listen to those who say God's Word is different from their perception of it.

For instance, the very people who today still consider our black brothers and sisters inferior cloak themselves in Christianity; most would admit to being very faithful Christians.

Raymond Brown, one of our most respected Catholic scripture scholars, cautions all of us who preach and teach the Bible to make this aspect of Jesus' teachings clear:

The constant message of the Gospels is that Jesus offended genuinely religious people

And we have to realize that he would continue to upset religious people of every generation if they understood the radical challenge of his message; indeed, he would offend many of us in this assembly today.

Jesus taught metanoia, with which he prefaced his proclamation of the kingdom, if it be translated literally as "change your mind", not "repent" as is often translated, catches the offense.

Religious people always seem to "know" what God wants, so telling the religious Jews of Jesus' time or the religious Christians of our time that God might want something radically different from what they have been doing could and can and does create fierce hostility toward the message.

The tendency for us when faced with these challenges is to think: "Yes, Jesus would offend those (translated "others") who think differently from the way I do."

When perhaps we should be thinking: "With my religious views Jesus might very well offend me."

For instance, what are you views on capital punishment?

And how do you make them correspond to what Jesus says about forgiveness 70 X 70?

What are your views on gays and lesbians? 

And how do you fit your view into Jesus' acceptance and love for the despised and hated people of his time?

Like Jeremiah, we have been taught that there are truths we should not speak because they would be demoralizing.

Like Jesus, we know that the reign of God issues an imperative call that relativises all other relationships C of kinship, of race, of class

Following The Gospel call often stretches these other relationships, making us reach for a point where all become father and mother and brother and sister to us.

In the process we discover that our anger and our love are really different faces of the same holy energy.

Adrienne Rich writes:

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

...they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.

Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius

to spin and weave in the same action

from her own boy, anywhere

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