Standing Under the Scriptures
June 29, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

Isaiah 2.10-17: All that is prideful will be brought low on the day of the Lord.

Matthew 10.34-42. Jesus declares himself to be disruptive of the conventional order of things while establishing a non-conventional order.

Last Sunday we discerned a common theme in our two readings (Jeremiah 20.7-18 and Matthew 10.16-31). It was that in carrying out the Lord’s commission, as prophet or disciple, the difficulties one encounters may be extreme. We found indications of the sources of these difficulties and, at least implicitly, assurance that they will be overcome.

In the case of Jeremiah these difficulties were of two sorts. First there was the fierce opposition that his deliverance of the message the Lord had entrusted to him aroused. He became a laughingstock, an object of reproach and derision, with even his close friends seeking to betray him. Then there was his own Job-like despair (cf. Job 3.1-19), which despite expressions of hope in mid-passage, was avowed with utter candor, beginning with.”Cursed be the day on which I was born” and ending with “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and to spend my days in shame?”

All this became less shocking and more understandable, we found, in the light of the background against which Jeremiah and the other prophets prophesied. Theirs was a time in which things were falling utterly apart. Jeremiah himself gives the classic account of this “shaking of the foundations”, a sort of undoing of the Genesis 1 creation (see 4.23-27). For the destruction of the nation and the exile of the people, first by Assyria and then by Babylon, was impending, or actual. Except perhaps through direct experience of World War II, such a situation is difficult to comprehend. Even 9/11 would not have conveyed it. My own approximation of it was in Saigon during the Vietnam War, where sometimes in our church services we could hear artillery and bombs dropped by B-52s. (I discovered that the prophets could be preached and heard there in a way that they could not back in America. It this discovery and reflection on it that gave rise to this insight of mine concerning their background and its significance.)

At the time most people shied away from the impending catastrophe, as we shy away from impending catastrophes collective and individual, in our own time. But to the prophets it was given to look at it squarely. It was given to them also to see what was really inside the people, their corruption and idolatry. Through the connection they made between these two perception the validity of the Covenant, indeed the structure of meaning itself, was preserved. It is not difficult to see why what they had to say aroused such intense hostility. In the face of it Jeremiah, with his sensitive soul, could not avoid despair. But in the candor with which he expresses it there is already a sign of redemption. For he could not have so expressed himself---he could not have afforded to---without at some level sensing that the Lord was with him and would redeem him.

In our Matthew passage we found elements that were much the same. Jesus, having commissioned his disciples to go out on mission (“the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few”) is candid with them about what awaits them. They will encounter opposition of the sort that Jeremiah attracted.. They will be delivered up to councils and flogged in synagogues and dragged before governors and kings. They will find, as did Jeremiah with his close friends, those with whom they have the closest natural ties to be murderously opposed to them: brother against brother, parent against child. Like their Master they will be called Beelzebul. We may wonder how this is so, in the apparent absence of a national catastrophe such as haunted Jeremiah’s time. But actually the respective situations were not so different. For Jesus’ gospel of total reliance on God called into question the position of the establishment, the councils and governors and kings, who put their trust in their power and prestige. Such things are inherently unreliable, despite their appearance of solidity. But in their fallen humanity they did not want to be confronted with this unreliability. Instead their response was to suppress those who made it evident.

What is different about the two passages is that the element of redemption, the underlying sovereignty of God, that is only implicit in the first is made explicit in the second. Jesus exhorts his disciples not to be anxious about what they will say in their defense, for the Spirit of their heavenly Father will speak through them. Indeed, he will enable them to proclaim from the housetops the message that has been given them. And they are not to fear, for they are of more value than many sparrows, not one of which “will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”

In this reassurance we may find the promise to Jesus’ disciples that they not only will be protected from the dangers they encounter in carrying out their commission but also will be abundantly rewarded for doing so. And if this was the case for them, so will it be also for us. For Jesus commissions us as well, if not to go out physically on mission at least to bear joyfully the afflictions which in the midst of our faithfulness may come our way.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted