Mass readings for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Jeremiah 17.5-8 Psalm 1.1-4, 6 1 Corinthians 15.12, 16-20 Luke 6.17, 20-26
Last week I spoke about Isaiah, the great prophet, and this week we hear from Jeremiah in the first reading. These two men bracket the period when prophets were active during the reign of the House of David over the truncated kingdom known as Judah. This is after Israel split into two smaller kingdoms, ending with the catastrophe of Jerusalem’s conquest by the Babylonians.
We read the prophets in conjunction with the history of ancient Israel as a cautionary tale – we shouldn’t want to do what they did, yet we repeat their sins.
Israel was what we call a “middle power” in the ancient world. So, for Canadians whose own country has that status today, it can be instructive to see how a nation of the past with a very particular self-understanding vis-à-vis ultimate things (God) manages its politics and its relations with other nations when it’s not the most powerful kingdom. Israel could not militarily threaten Egypt or Babylon or Persia; but it did have military and economic power that it could leverage.
I believe Canada once had a sense of having a special role to play in history; distinct from the mother country of Great Britain, and in contrast to its republican sibling, the United States. And that role was conceived of in very Christian terms. Consider our national motto: a mari usque ad mare – from ‘sea to sea’ – these words are from the Bible, referencing a verse from Psalm 72:
“He (God) shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” (Ps 72.8)
That tells me Canada was not intended as a postmodern, post-national state, an economic jurisdiction with a random population conducting business from within borders that are nothing more than an accident of history, scarcely anything to be respected let alone defining. Yet this is what we’ve been left with, save for a very recent attempt to reignite the fires of patriotic love among us in a time of crisis.
What do the prophets have do with our current problems in Canada; a country they wouldn’t have dreamt of?
Well, in our Christian convictions, we believe the prophets, while sent to warn Israel, speak timelessly to all people, and what they teach is to be learned by humanity even as we do so at a torturously slow pace.
We need to back up a little and remind ourselves of who these prophets were; especially since they stand in a very special relationship to Christ.
First off, they aren’t fortune-tellers. They don’t tell the future. Rather they are spokesmen of God, and they warn of the consequences of sin, of the failure to trust in God. But they also tell us of the good result we can expect when we keep God’s law. And they also give us the consoling message that if we obstinately continue in our wicked ways, meet with destruction, God will still be there for us, and we can begin again, the survivors among the rubble can start over.
Isaiah is not the first prophet ever. Prophets existed in Israel from the outset of the nation composed of twelve Hebrew tribes. The prophets we know so well are called “the literary prophets” because we have books that either they wrote, or a follower wrote recording their words. Before these there were men such as Samuel, a priest and prophet who was very critical of Israel’s first ever king, Saul; he famously anoints the boy David to take the place of that wicked king. During David’s reign, there is the prophet Nathan who called out David for his sins.
Prophets serve as “the conscience of the king”, as a social conscience for the nation as a whole, they are to spur to action whatever true repentance calls for from the people and their leaders. We can tell that they were true agents of God from the consistency and accuracy of what they say, but more so from the universal wisdom they give that we can follow today. God’s word is eternal.
Now they were indispensable in a world where you didn’t have media, journalism, democracy and popular representation, any capacity for the community to comment on or challenge authority short of peasant rebellions and civil wars. But as with all such things, the powerful once they lose their fear of God, begin to subvert such institutions that are a check on their power. And that’s how we get two very different kinds of prophets: the prophets I’ve spoken of, and then court prophets who are often referred to in scripture as “the false prophets”.
And this latter group are shills for the king and his cronies. They claim to speak on God’s behalf, but are employed by the king to silence critics and to convince the people that the king is doing a great job, is being faithful to the Lord, and so, is to be trusted and obeyed.
Now, with Isaiah and Jeremiah, and all those in between, we’ve got prophets outside the royal court. Rogue prophets! They don’t get equal time with the court prophets; they aren’t given time at the public ceremonies to address the crowd as the false prophets were; they aren’t invited to address the royal court or speak to the temple’s high priest. They are left to shout from the sidelines, to gather people wherever they can draw them, just as our Lord Jesus Christ did.
Isaiah, being the king’s cousin, got away with his criticisms. Jeremiah, well, he’s nobody really, but he just didn’t care what the king and the false prophets had to say; in his case, he risked his life to speak out against the nation’s leaders.
We have to be careful of a similar situation today. Who is in the pay of the king, as it were – who’s on the payroll? We know that major media in Canada receive subsidies from the federal government; and recent revelations south of the border indicate that aid money found its way into the pockets of media organizations both in the States and around the world, including the parent company of the Globe and Mail newspaper. We must ask ourselves who really is concerned with the truth of things, as painful, as distressing as it may be to learn of what’s really going on.
And in Jeremiah’s time, a great many people didn’t want to hear what he had to say because they were so invested in the idea that as God’s chosen people, that was enough to vouchsafe them from harm; and that the king as God’s anointed was to be trusted even as his decisions were objectively foolish. Jeremiah told them, repeatedly, just being Judeans and doing the Temple rituals will not save you; Israel is to be righteous but it wasn’t. And the king? Well, he is to rule according to divine precepts, to trust in God and in His holy ways, and not follow the example of other ancient rulers, especially in terms of their international politicking, a very dangerous game. In this case, defying Babylon while trying to make a deal with Egypt. It doesn’t turn out well.
Canadians have a horrible propensity to similar conceits: that we’re special because, well we are, because we’re not Americans, we’re not British, we’re nice, and so, it’s unfair for us to suffer and unjust that we should be made uncomfortable by others pointing out how far short we’ve fallen of our own estimation of ourselves.
It has been disturbing to hear how rife with corruption and undermined by organized crime this country is with respect to the drug trade; learning that the reason so little fentanyl has been impounded in this country was the result of a lack of enforcement, and not because there wasn’t any to be found. We now have the admission that there are thousands of drug labs operating in this country, and that they have been for quite a while.
We also continue to trust authority even when we’ve ample evidence of incompetence, corruption and deceit.
The Canadian journalist Stephen Punwasi, relying on government statistics and a little bit of his own digging, reports that the idea of Canada as a safe, peaceful place is a ridiculous fiction. We have a low murder rate because many police are reluctant to classify homicides as such. He notes how we have an incredibly high rate of missing persons. In B.C., for example, the rate of missing persons is 30X higher than California. As he puts it, in Canada not many people are victims of criminal assassinations, but an awful lot of people disappear; and the police are curiously reluctant to go into what’s happened to them – they’re scared for themselves and their families; and they’ve so little support from our leaders.
But have you seen this reported on, discussed in mainstream media over the past decade? Or were other things taking up the space and time; matters that our leaders preferred to have our attention?
As I mentioned, the prophets stand in relation to Christ – he is the culmination of all prophecy. And the well-known beatitudes, these are supposed to be the agenda of our nation; our aspiration as a people is to be blessed. Yet can any of us truthfully say that any of this has been accomplished? We are poorer, hungrier and not particularly joyful as a country; and Christians, I would note, have been the object of disdain in recent years, our defaced and destroyed churches giving evidence of that.
What Jesus teaches in his sermon is that there is a blessing in acknowledging that we’re poor and hungry and lacking joy because that means we’re at last facing the reality of our lives, and are now ready to turn ourselves around, repent, and begin the work the prophets begged Israel to begin: to be a righteous people and to make virtue our strength, and God our king. Then our enemies would be cowed and ashamed to even think of lifting their hand against a holy people. Such is our work. So, rejoice and be glad, for in doing it, our reward will be great.
Amen.
Links:
Stephen Punwasi posts on X
Gangs in B.C. report on Global