31 st January: 4 th Sunday after Epiphany

Prophetic Words

In 1980, the El Salvadorian Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while celebrating Mass. The context was one of deteriorating violence. A military junta was cracking down on opponents, among them sections of the church that had thrown their support behind the nation’s poorest. In the preceding couple of years, Romero had played a dangerous game of brinkmanship. He criticised the structural violence of society, denouncing the torture and disappearances meted out by the state, while also refusing to support the violence of insurgent groups.

Romero’s greatest weapon was his words. He used them like precision-targeted missiles. Romero sought to link the horrors of daily violence with the sufferings of Christ. By doing so, he wasn’t encouraging passive victimhood, but spurring people on to endure by placing their pain within the greater horizon of God’s work of transfiguration. Romero’s reflections on the life of Jesus became the foundation for a call to peace, for justice and an end to degrading poverty. After one of his close friends—a Jesuit priest—was the subject of a targeted killing, Romero saw his own path marked out before him. ¹

Words are powerful. Words were used to order Romero’s death. Words from the Gospel were read by Romero as his final Mass: ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ St. John called Jesus ‘the word made flesh’. Words have the power to shape and change reality in profound ways. We use them to build up, and we use them tear down.

Some words are prophetic. They are like a scalpel applied to the social body. The prophet Jeremiah, Jesus, and in recent history, Romero, each spoke from a place of burning conviction. It’s this word—the prophetic word—that dominates our Old Testament and Gospel readings today.

Though separated by many centuries, Jeremiah and Jesus have much in common. Both had a special calling from God, which was laid down before they had any choice about it. ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you prophet to the nations’. These are words God spoke to Jeremiah. We might see a resonance with accounts of the annunciation, where Mary is told that her ‘…child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.’

These are lives that have been marked out by God with a special purpose, a vocation. Either could have chosen to lead alternative lives, quiet lives with normal-looking families and regular, decently paid work. Yet both had a God-given task and to deny it meant denying something central to their own identities.

Just as there were similarities between the vocations of Jeremiah and Jesus, so too were there similarities in the historical contexts to which they were called to witness. In both, the people to whom God had bound himself in a covenant; the people who fled slavery in Egypt, received the Law of Moses and established an impressive Kingdom under David, the people, that is, with a noble history of survival, suffering and triumph, were now mired in a deep crisis. Politics and religion had become intertwined and corrupt. Pragmatic compromises, cynicism, self-serving ideology were everywhere. The social fabric was frayed and weak. There was also, in both cases, a serious threat against the very existence of the Kingdom.

In Jeremiah’s time the expansionist Babylonian superpower was threatening annihilation if Judah refused to submit. In Jesus, time, the whole community lived under the prospect that the Romans would lose patience with local Jewish rulers and put down resistance with bloody violence.

Both figures stand in the middle of profound crisis and corruption, attempting to express in words the convictions God has put in their hearts. Inevitably there were firebrands on one side spoiling for a fight and, on the other, political and religious elites doing everything to shore up their position. In the middle are the poor, the forgotten, and the expendable. With them stand Jeremiah and Jesus, refusing to give allegiance to rulers or violent revolutionaries, while calling for a conversion toward the God of righteousness and peace.

All they have at their disposal are words and a poetic imagination that tries to inspire people to see and think outside of the patterns to which they’ve become accustomed. They are called by God to speak ‘words of discontinuity, words which end what was seen to be absolute, words which begin what was seen to be impossible. [They are] summoned to shatter and form worlds by [their] speech’. ²

Were they successful? Jeremiah was imprisoned, and his advice was ignored. Jesus was nailed to a cross. The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and deported huge swathes of the population in 587 BCE. The Romans came in 70 CE and destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and quelled the Jewish revolt with brutality. There is more than a hint of tragedy in the biographies of these prophetic men.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus suffered for their stance and not just in the form of physical attacks. Both faced an interior struggle to stay true to their calling as opposition mounted. Being a prophet can be desperately lonely. Jeremiah is famous for matching his complaints against his society with complaints against the God who called him to a thankless task. Jesus wrestled in that desert place alone with his demons. He wrestled with God in Gethsemane. He had times of alienation from his family, and today’s reading indicates that the residents of his home town wanted him dead after he suggested that foreigners might be the subject of God’s grace along with them.

Was it all worth it? Were their lives in vain?

The resurrection faith says that it was worth it. It affirms that the struggle and the sacrifice served truth and righteousness. Their lives pointed to something eternal, something indestructible. This is why we remember them. This is why we may call Romero a saint. This is why we revere Jeremiah as a prophet and this is why we call Jesus ‘Lord’. In them the command of God and the call of God rang out in the midst of human history. Their words kindled a holy flame in the darkest of nights.

What can we do to honour their memory? We can listen out for the call that God makes on each our lives. We can be prepared to suffer for righteousness’ sake. Above all, we can follow Christ. We can use our words to witness to the truth, to tear down falsehood, to call out injustice and to build up faith, hope, and love among all those whom God entrusts to us.