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Year C: 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time First Reading: Jeremiah 1:4-5,17-19
When Jesus says in today’s Gospel that a prophet was never welcome in their own land, he could quite probably have had Jeremiah in mind. Perhaps of all the prophets, Jeremiah was the one that aroused the greatest hostility. Elsewhere in his book, he makes it clear that he did not want to be a prophet but every time he tried to stop preaching the Word of God became a fire inside him and he could not help but speak it.
It is a shame that such a shy man thrust into the public arena should find his name used as almost a term of abuse: a Jeremiah being universally seen as a prophet of doom.
In fact, reading the Book of Jeremiah leads us to see that he did not see it all as unmitigated disaster - but he did come up against authorities and powers and, eventually, joined the other people from Israel in Exile and may even have been executed for his pains.
Recording his call at the beginning of his Book shows, however, that he knew from the outset what the future was likely to hold for him. It seems that he was aware that, even before his birth, God had marked him out as a prophet.
This is not a mission for the faint-hearted - and God braces him up - forces him to stand proud and not to be dismayed by his opponents... facing their wrath is as nothing to facing God’s!
Like Jesus, Jeremiah looks ahead to a ministry that will bring him onto conflict with the powers-that-be - but, like Jesus, he has God’s promise that they will not overcome him.
There must have been times when it felt as though they had - but we trust that the promises made to him by God were fulfilled and he received the reward to fidelity to the calling in the face of personal suffering and vilification.
Text © 2006 Wellspring | Gospel | First Reading | Second Reading | [ Weekly Wellsprings ] |
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