Twentieth Sunday Ordinary Time Jer 38:4-6, 8-10; Ps 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Heb 12:1-4; Lk 12:49-53
This Sunday’s readings give us a glimpse — or two or three — of the risks involved in radical obedience to God’s call. Prophetic types, who, like Jeremiah and Jesus, speak the hard truth, especially to power, inevitably meet resistance and frequently rejection, even from family and community.
In the first reading, we meet Jeremiah at a desperate moment. Out of favor with the dueling powers-that-be due to his dire warnings of destruction, Jeremiah has one last chance to change his tune. Instead, he delivers a decidedly unpatriotic message: “Thus says the Lord: He who remains in the city shall die by sword, or famine, or pestilence; but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live; his life shall be spared as booty, and he shall live. … This city shall certainly be handed over to the army of the King of Babylon; he shall capture it.”
In a nutshell: Surrender or die. Let go of power or watch Jerusalem burn to the ground. This sets the stage for the part of the story we hear at Mass.
The princes, whose collective power rivals that of King Zedekiah, reject Jeremiah’s doomsday declaration. Threatened by his truth, they demand his death. Hapless Zedekiah gives in to their wishes, and the princes throw Jeremiah into a courtyard cistern, where he sinks into the mud. We can imagine his desperate prayers from the bottom of the pit.
It seems Jeremiah has one last friend in high places. A court official, Ebed-Melech the Cushite, i.e., the Ethiopian, intervenes and persuades the king to draw Jeremiah up from the pit, delivering him from certain death.
The dramatic rescue portrayed in verses one and two from Psalm 40 fits hand-in-glove with Jeremiah’s tale. In the Lectionary translation, the repetition “waited, waited” implies the urgency and immediacy of the verb in the original Hebrew, echoing the desperation of the prophet in the pit.
Verse three mentions a “new song,” signaling a real-life transformation apparent to others: “And he put a new song into my mouth, a hymn to our God. Many shall look on in awe and trust in the Lord.” This suffering one, now delivered, has become a living sign.
For most of us, most of the time, change happens, but soon enough life settles back into some version of the status quo. The “new song” of Psalm 40 indicates a more radical shift — to a whole new place, or a new plain of existence, as might occur in the wake of a death or a birth.
The revered Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls this place New Orientation and explains that getting there requires a break with old ideas and ways of doing things, a letting go of the past.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus sees what lies ahead — the “baptism” of his passion and death. His great anguish comes through as he warns his disciples of the cost of following him: Once reliable bonds of blood or kinship by marriage will break down, as the message of the Gospel hits home. Once stable communities will fracture as the truth meets rejection.
The Letter to the Hebrews offers some solace. In taking the risk of discipleship, putting all that we are in the hands of God and at the service of God’s reign in our world, we are not alone, but “surrounded by… a cloud of witnesses.” More importantly, Jesus has gone before us, through the worst that the world can dish out — through rejection, betrayal, suffering and death, and has come to a new and glorious place at the right hand of God.
With our eyes on him, and his Spirit flowing through us, we, too, can face the perils of the journey, bearing witness to the truth of the Gospel in our words and actions, and accepting the consequences as our share in the sufferings of Christ.
Melanie holds a master’s in pastoral studies from Loyola University, New Orleans.