The Truth Hurts

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” We’ve all heard the refrain, and we all know deep down inside that it’s false. Words have an incredible power in our lives. They have the ability to change us for the better or the worse. When you think of the positive impact of words, you might think of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, or Neil Armstrong as he descended to the surface of the moon. These words fill us with pride or spur is on to good actions. Words can also move us to profoundly evil emotions and actions. The genocide in Rwanda which killed up to 1,000,000 people was in part brought about by government propaganda that repeatedly accused the oppressed Tutsis of being roaches, of subhuman dignity. Because words are so important and powerful, telling the truth is as equally important and powerful an action. Today’s readings highlight the importance and necessity of proclaiming the truth.

In the first reading we encounter the prophet Jeremiah, who is one of the more colorful Old Testament figures. God choses him to be a prophet, to proclaim the truth to Israel. Jeremiah wants none of it. He knows he’ll be persecuted for it, and he’s not up to the task. Basically, he’s like any one of us: “God, don’t choose me, I can’t do; I’m not the one for the job.” But in a very powerful passage, Jeremiah recounts, “The Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, ‘behold I have put my words in your mouth.’” From then on, no matter how much Jeremiah wants to keep silent and not speak the truth, he’s almost forced to do so. At one point Jeremiah complains, “The Word of the Lord has brought me nothing but shame, criticism, and ridicule. If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name, there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.’” The prophet Jeremiah, regardless of consequences, was compelled to speak the truth.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is in the same boat. He comes to his hometown of Nazareth, where he preaches in the synagogue, The Gospel tells us, “all spoke highly of him and all were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But Christ knew that the people’s hearts weren’t in the right place. They were looking for signs and wonders, but didn’t want to go through the hard and necessary process of repentance. So Jesus reads their hearts—he’s God, so he can do that—and tells them the truth. Now imagine how much that must have hurt him, on a human level, to do so. He had been enjoying nothing but fame and adoration up to that point. In addition, these were the people he grew up with and knew intimately. These supposed friends and neighbors go from speaking highly of him to trying to kill him in a paroxysm of fury. Jesus, like Jeremiah, is driven to tell the truth, no matter what the personal consequences. Telling the truth has huge implications.

At our baptism, each of us was baptized into Christ. That means we take on Christ’s role (and Jeremiah’s, who prefigured Christ) of prophet. That doesn’t mean we go around reading palms or telling people that the world’s going to end in 2012. No, in the biblical sense a prophet is simply one who preaches the truth, consequences be as they may. We are witnessing a great example of someone living out his baptismal call to be a prophet with the great college quarterback, Tim Tebow. During the Super Bowl next Sunday, he will appear in a commercial that defends the sacredness and dignity of life from the moment of conception. The commercial, because it implicitly shows the evil nature of abortion, is being protested by many groups. Tim Tebow is in a real sense, a prophet; one who can say with Jeremiah, “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” If God lives in us through grace, my brothers and sisters, shouldn’t he also speak through us?

Parents have a unique and privileged role in standing up for truth. The Church teaches that parents, and not teachers or other authorities, are the primary educators of their children. It falls squarely on the shoulders of moms and dads to pass along the truths of the faith and important values to their children in the midst of a very confusing culture. This is no easy task in our society, but it is nonetheless necessary. Parents, you have a special advantage in educating your children, though, precisely because you love them more than anyone else.

It is this all-important love that St. Paul extols in the second reading. St. Paul was no shrinking violet when it came to proclaiming the truth. He wrote, “Woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel!” But he also realized that preaching the truth was fruitless without love. In today’s second reading he says, “If I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, but do not have love, I am nothing.” The mistake that we make so often is teaching, admonishing, or correcting without love. A person is converted, or comes to the truth, not through our brilliant arguments or flawless reasoning, but through the love that accompanies our profession of the faith. Jesus says, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

All of us have areas of our life where we don’t live the truth fully. We should examine our relationships with our spouse, our parents, or our friends to see where lies, sometimes so hidden but dangerous, are rooted. It would also be beneficial to examine how well we have lived our baptismal calling to be prophets-to stand up for the truth, regardless of the consequences. So often, I think we will find, we are more than comfortable just going with the flow. But, my brothers and sisters, Christ is constantly calling us to more. He calls us to live in the splendor of his truth and in the deep impenetrable bond of his love. Christ said to his disciples and he says to us, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

The Merest of Babes

The Mass readings for today (Tuesday after 1st Sunday of Advent, year B1: Is 11:1-10; Ps 72:1-2, 7-8, 12-13, 17; Lk 10:21-24) are really nice. The first one, from the prophet Isaiah, is fine, and the second one from Luke is one of my very favorites. It articulates the topsy-turvy logic of the Gospel in which the whole thought of the city of man is turned upside down. Below, I've copied it out of the RSV translation because it sounds a bit nicer to my ears than the lectionary.

In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Then turning to the disciples he said privately, "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it," (Lk 10:21-24).

Think about that, folks. Children! Your kids understand Jesus better than you do. At another place, Jesus says that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom ahead of the pharisees. To us, pharisee is a bad word. Not so for them. We often compare the pharisees to lawyers, politicians, or priests. None of those is comparable though, because they have bad connotations in our ears. Maybe expert is a better way to think of them. Jesus is basically saying that tax collectors and prostitutes are finding peace of conscience, joy of life, and the faith, hope, and love that leads into eternal life. And we're not. We don't get it, or else we're getting it pretty late.

We think we're good, we think we know how Jesus thinks and works, we think we've got life under control. Children know that they need help. "Daddy, can you tie my shoe?" A drug addicted prostitute lying in a gutter knows that she needs help. She might even know that help's name is Jesus (it literally means "salvation" in Hebrew!). But we are smug and sit in the train station thinking that we are conducting the salvation train, and so it leaves the station without us. How many of us, perhaps unbeknownst to even ourselves, feel that we are somehow doing Jesus a favor by going to church. It makes me think of the ancient pagan idea of feeding the gods with sacrifices of the flesh of goats and bulls.

Lol. But we have a God who wants to feed us with His own immortal flesh. Are we humble enough to just listen, like a little child? Or are we, in our smugness, going to say, "Lord, Lord!" while harboring an attitude that blinds us to His love, Him who the prophets yearned to see? Lol. And when we see Him, will we be too concerned with what others thing, too cool and sophisticated and mature, to let ourselves respond wholeheartedly? Children are better than adults again in that they are more naive, and simpler. It was fun to watch even some very sophisticated and hip sixteen year olds' jaws drop when we brought them to the forest for a hike, to see them climb trees and play on the rocks. Are we too sophisticated and "mature" to enjoy the Kingdom of God?

St. John Vianney vs. Hananiah

Feast of St. John Vianney
Priest (Aug 4)

Ok, so St. John Vianney (1786-1859) didn't actually beat up Hananiah (oh, let's say 650 BC to 588 BC, give or take). But his spirit sure did; or rather, we should say that Jeremiah, who outdid Hananiah, lived on in spirit in the person of St. John Vianney.

The Babylonians had attacked Jerusalem and taken some of her leadership into captivity. They replaced the king of Judah with their own man, who took the name Zedekiah. Zedekiah turned out to be not so much a puppet as they had hoped, and decided to rebel against the Babylonians; to do so, he would recruit the help of the Egyptians. Hananiah and some of the other court "prophets" were happy to be yes-men and encouraged Zedekiah. Jeremiah, on the other hand, told them all flat out that it was the will of God that they should be humbled a while longer, that they should not ally with the Egyptians because the Egyptians' help never turned out well. He repeated until he was blue in the face that Judah's new found national pride was opposed by the will of God. To make his point, he strapped onto himself a wooden yoke, like a farmer would use to harness a pair of oxen. Sure enough, the Babylonians come back with a vengeance and lay seige to the Holy City.

Today's first Mass reading (Jer 28:1-17; Ps 119:29, 43, 79, 80, 95, 102; Mt 14:22-36) picks up at this point. Hananiah, the mealy-mouthed so-called prophet smashes the yoke from Jeremiah and proclaims that in like manner God Himself will lift the seige and save the city. Jeremiah goes and fetches an iron yoke and straps it to himself: Judah, you are on the wrong course! Repent! Trust God, not the Egyptians! He turns his wrath on Hananiah and tell him that because he has falsely spoken on behalf of the Lord, he will not live to see the year's end. Sure enough, Hananiah died within a few months. Within a few more months, in the year 587 BC, Jerusalem is taken by the Babylonians, her entire leadership deported, Zedekiah's eyes were put out and his sons murdered by the Babylonian general, and the city was laid waste and her population dispersed.

About 2400 years separate St. John Vianney from the time of the holy prophet Jeremiah and the false prophet Hananiah, but the same perennial battle was underway and is underway still. On one hand, the sunny optimists of progress continually tell us that all is well, that by our own efforts and on our own terms, we can make the world a better place. They call opponents pessimistic, unpatriotic, narrowminded, backwards, and worse. The only problems they see are in their opponents' unwillingness to trust them.

St. John Vianney spoke out against the merry laxity of his day, in which religious observance was mechanical and infrequent. He spoke out against the immorality that lax observance protected. He spoke out even against people, when they encouraged that immorality. His homilies were not nice, and people did not like to hear what he had to say. "So gloomy, this new priest," one can almost here people saying as they left church after Sunday Mass. Importantly, St. John Vianney did not merely speak out against these evils, but he lived out against them. His whole life was a testimony to goodness, virtue, prayer, devotion, service, and joy.

But then something began to happen. People began to respond. By the time he died, Ars, the little village where he was pastor, had been transformed into a thriving spiritual center, laden with apostolic works and saturated in the prayer of its few hundred residents and tens of thousands of visitors.

In our time, there are numerous false prophets leading our people down paths of evil, insisting that all would be well if only Christians would shut up. Whenever anyone is hurt along these roads of evil, these false prophets insist that all is really well, and getting better. We must show them wrong by speaking truth lovingly, and by living love truthfully.

St. John Vianney and Holy Jeremiah, pray for us.

Elijah and the Prophets of Baal

The 1st Mass reading proper to today's season (Wed after the 10th Sunday of Ordinary Time) was suppressed in favor of the Feast of St. Barnabas. The suppressed reading (1 Kngs 18:20-39) is one of my favorites, so I am going to post it below, with a few words to follow.

So Ahab sent to all the Israelites and had the prophets assemble on Mount Carmel. Elijah appealed to all the people and said, "How long will you straddle the issue? If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him." The people, however, did not answer him. So Elijah said to the people, "I am the only surviving prophet of the LORD, and there are four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. Give us two young bulls. Let them choose one, cut it into pieces, and place it on the wood, but start no fire. I shall prepare the other and place it on the wood, but shall start no fire. You shall call on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The God who answers with fire is God."

All the people answered, "Agreed!"

Elijah then said to the prophets of Baal, "Choose one young bull and prepare it first, for there are more of you. Call upon your gods, but do not start the fire."

Taking the young bull that was turned over to them, they prepared it and called on Baal from morning to noon, saying, "Answer us, Baal!" But there was no sound, and no one answering. And they hopped around the altar they had prepared.

When it was noon, Elijah taunted them: "Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating, or may have retired, or may be on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." They called out louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until blood gushed over them. Noon passed and they remained in a prophetic state until the time for offering sacrifice. But there was not a sound; no one answered, and no one was listening.

Then Elijah said to all the people, "Come here to me." When they had done so, he repaired the altar of the LORD which had been destroyed. He took twelve stones, for the number of tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the LORD had said, "Your name shall be Israel." He built an altar in honor of the LORD with the stones, and made a trench around the altar large enough for two seahs of grain. When he had arranged the wood, he cut up the young bull and laid it on the wood. "Fill four jars with water," he said, "and pour it over the holocaust and over the wood." "Do it again," he said, and they did it again. "Do it a third time," he said, and they did it a third time. The water flowed around the altar, and the trench was filled with the water. At the time for offering sacrifice, the prophet Elijah came forward and said, "LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things by your command. Answer me, LORD! Answer me, that this people may know that you, LORD, are God and that you have brought them back to their senses."

The LORD'S fire came down and consumed the holocaust, wood, stones, and dust, and it lapped up the water in the trench. Seeing this, all the people fell prostrate and said, "The LORD is God! The LORD is God!"

Ok. A few thoughts:

1. Prophecy is not speaking the future, but speaking on behalf of God. The prophets of Ba'al claimed to speak on behalf of God, and in fact, they recognized Ba'al as the one and only God (kind of). But their 'god' was not the same as the One True God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who called himself Yahweh. Yahweh means "I am," and refers to the absolute necessity and eternity of God - He is the one and only thing that necessarily, must exist, and always has and always will exist. It is the same God that revealed himself to Abraham and to Moses and in love made lavish promises to them.

2. "Ba'al" on the other hand means "master," and refers to that demons desire for us, to master and dominate us through stealth or force. If not the same being that deceived Adam and Eve in the garden, to whom unredeemed Man has ever since been in bondage, the two beings are clearly closely related.

3. Discernment is the art of distinguishing what comes from God, and what does not. In this account we are given a model from discernment. No matter how hard the false prophets shouted, hopped, and gashed themselves with knives, the darn sacrifice wouldn't burn: there was no one to hear them. Their works, prayers, etc., were all futile because they were not from God and to God.

4. The Christian life might be seen as a sort of preparing oneself, or letting the Church prepare us, to be a living sacrifice. We must carefully discern the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives to conform ourselves to the will of God. Firstly me must learn to avoid sin. We must learn to fulfill the obligations of our state in life. We must allow our mixed motivations to be purged. Ultimately we must grow to let all our acts originate, be permeated by, and aim at love. As we are conformed to Christ, the Holy Spirit will descend on us like fire from on high and set us ablaze, but, like the Burning Bush that spoke to Moses, we will not be destroyed by what consumes us.

5. In the process, we will increasingly radiate God's love and show His people and the world the right way to follow the Lord.

The Church's First Prophet

Birth of St. John the Baptist (June 24)

Each year the Church celebrates the life and death of hundreds of saints. Of all the holy days in the Church year, only three mark births: that of Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, of His holy and immaculate mother, and of his cousin John. Yet St. John the Baptist is not often anybody's favorite saint. That's odd, because Our Lord said, "Among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist," (Mt 11:11). We speak of a Marian dimension of the Church, that is, the Church's role as a loving mother. We speak of the Church's Petrine dimension, of her authority. We might, perhaps should, also speak of her Johannine dimension - her role as prophet.

Though they sometimes do so, prophets are not people who tell the future. Prophets tell the truth. Prophets speak God's word in season and out, telling people exactly what they do not want to hear. King Herod probably wanted to hear clever riddles and predictions, but from St. John he heard only a stern rebuke: "It is not lawful for you to have her," (Mt 14:4). Herod had taken his brother's wife in lust, and John called him on it. Herod's neice, the daughter of his brother and his wife, danced seductively for him, he promised her anything. At her mother's urging she demanded on a platter the head of the man who would wreck her life. Herod's head was swollen with pride, and so he could not look small in front of the little potentates of Palestine. "A promise is a promise, and what will people think?" his warped conscience must have asked. Thus the only sane man in that Jerry Springer castle, the Baptist, was baptized in blood and his head was made a gift to a gruesome little girl.

Before Jesus began his public ministry, John began his. John's ministry focused on preparing people to receive the Christ when he should come to them. When Jesus' disciples heard of John's fate, they must have known that their master would meet increasing opposition. So it is with the Church. When we reflect on the coming of the Baptist into the world, we should recall the Church's own mission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them... teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you..." (Mt 28:19-20). The Holy Spirit sent John to prepare the world for the Coming of the Christ. The Holy Spirit sends the Church to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Christ. Immersed in the world and proclaiming Christ, the Church steadily finds herself confronted with greater and greater opposition. Bearing in mind the sort of baptism with which the Baptist was baptized, we will not have to wonder long what sort of baptism might yet await the faithful who follow in his footsteps. What choice do we have, but to tell the truth? For the courage to lead people to truth, in season and out, we need to look constantly, and be configured more and more, to Him who is "the way, the truth, and the life," (Jn 14:6).

St. John the Baptist, pray for us.