Sunday Readings Commentary
Father Andrew Wadsworth offers a short commentary on this week's Sunday Lectionary readings.
To read the relevant Bible passage just click on the reference.
Before reading and reflecting on God's word you might like to use the following prayer:
O Lord,
who hast given us thy word
for a light to shine upon our path:
Grant us so to meditate upon that word
and follow its teaching,
that we may find in it the light that shineth
more and more unto the perfect day:
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time
In those days: The officials said to the king, ‘Let this man, Jeremiah, be put to death, for he is weakening the hands of the soldiers who are left in this city, and the hands of all the people, by speaking such words to them. For this man is not seeking the welfare of this people, but their harm.’ King Zedekiah said, ‘Behold, he is in your hands, for the king can do nothing against you.’ So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king’s son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.
Ebed-melech went from the king’s house and said to the king, ‘My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they did to Jeremiah the prophet by casting him into the cistern, and he will die there of hunger, for there is no bread left in the city.’ Then the king commanded Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, ‘Take thirty men with you from here, and lift Jeremiah the prophet out of the cistern before he dies.’
The prophet Jeremiah was a peaceable person, whose mission was to threaten the people of Jerusalem with destruction by the might of the approaching Babylonian armies. Their only hope lay not in military efficiency and power or in alliance with foreign nations, but in fidelity to the Lord. This was not the only message he had to give, for he also foretold that the Exile would bring a new covenant and forgiveness of sin as they repented their infidelities in exile and returned to the Lord. In any case, he tried to escape this mission by pretending to God that he had a stutter, but the Lord told him to quit pretending and get on with the job. The King systematically tore up his prophecies as they were read out, sheet by sheet, but at the same time he had a nasty, sinking feeling that Jeremiah was right. However, his military personnel overruled him and silenced Jeremiah by dumping him in the mud at the bottom of an underground water-storage tank This reading is chosen to pair with the gospel reading, and so to teach that the message of fidelity to the Lord and to Christ is bound to be a sign of contradiction and to provoke opposition.
Brothers and Sisters: Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or faint-hearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
The previous readings have concentrated on the faith of the ancestors of Israel, a historical recital. Now the author turns to encouragement of the recipients of the Letter. The emphasis is now all on endurance, after the model of Jesus in his Passion, which won for him a place at the right hand of God (again an allusion to Psalm 110). As Paul so frequently does in his letters, the author here makes use of metaphors from the Games which were so important in the culture of the times. We are to keep running steadily and not lose sight of Jesus: this conjures up an image of an exhausted runner, desperate to keep going and not lose sight of the leader in the race. Then in the final sentence of the reading the metaphor is changed to a more lethal confrontation, fighting to the point of death, perhaps boxing or an outright gladiatorial contest. Faith is still the dominant motif, but it has now been joined by endurance, of which Jesus is the prime example.
By his acceptance of the cross and the shame and suffering Jesus is the pioneer and the completion of our faith, for he endured it all in view of the joy which lay before him at the resurrection. Important as was the great cloud of witnesses to faith in the Old Testament, this was only a preliminary, and can be set aside by Christians, since for Christians Jesus is alone sufficient, the ultimate exemplar of faith and endurance. He is the beginning and the end, the inspiration and completion.
At that time: Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided: three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’
What is this? Jesus came to bring peace and harmony, to perfect the fond unity of society and families. How is it then that he can here say exactly the opposite? And without apology! There is no, ‘I am afraid there may sometimes be disagreements in the family’. Rather, ‘I have come to bring disagreements in the family’. To make things worse, in Judaism the family is the basic unit which sticks together through thick and thin. Any Jew will be thoroughly shocked by this passage. We have seen repeatedly that Jesus’ statements are often fierce and extreme: ‘if your hand causes you to fall, cut it off’; ‘let the dead bury their dead’. Elsewhere he says ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven’ – and the traditional let-out clause that he is talking about a small gate in Jerusalem is simply wrong; there was no such gate! Jesus is teaching that the most sacred earthly ties are less important than loyalty to him. He chooses the family deliberately because it is so sacred and important, but even so, less important than following him.
As we approach the end of the collection of instructions for the mission of his disciples after his own departure, Jesus leaves his hearers in no doubt that, important as family unity is, it will on occasion be shattered by a division in loyalty to Christ. How much more must we be prepared to give up our own bad habits and evasions and jealousies and hypocrisies to be true followers of Christ!