Finding hope in Jerusalem, Babylon, and Sweden: homily for the thirtieth Sunday on Ordinary Time

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Today I’m going to talk about Jerusalem, Babylon, and Sweden—all of them, in different ways, places of hope.

We are probably used to hearing messages of hope in church, so we could easily miss just how remarkable our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah really is.  This particular message of hope, if placed in context, is as startling as stumbling upon a lush citrus grove in the Arabian desert.  To appreciate the passage, it helps to remember a bit about the tragic and cantankerous life of Jeremiah.  This is the prophet, after all, whose name gives us the literary term “jeremiad” to describe a long speech bitterly denuncing something or someone.  In fact, the book of Jeremiah contains plenty of jeremiads.  The prophet denounces the elite of Jerusalem for straying from the law revealed to them by Moses, for their petty idolatry and corruption, for their self-satisfaction and complacency.  Their cowardly refusal to return to the faith of their ancestors has left the Kingdom of Judah weak and vulnerable to its enemies, Jeremiah warns, as had many prophets before him.  What sets Jeremiah apart from these other prophets of gloom is that he tells Jerusalem’s rulers that they have ignored God’s message for too long, and now it’s too late.  A superpower has risen in the East—Babylon—and nothing Judah’s rulers do now will stop it.  It is better, Jeremiah warns, to surrender.

Jeremiah’s message—“you’ve been leading us in the wrong direction for a generation, and you can’t escape the consequences of your actions”—did not win him popularity.  Judah’s rulers hired a more optimistic prophet, Hananiah, who delivered a message more to their liking.  But a few pages before today’s first reading, Hananiah drops dead, a none-too-subtle sign that the Lord does not approve his message.  As the Babylonians close in and a brutal siege begins, Jeremiah tells the people of Jerusalem, you will be defeated, your city destroyed, and then you will be dragged off into exile.

And then—only then—this remarkable vision: “Shout with joy Jacob, exult at the head of the nations… The Lord has delivered his people, the remnant of Israel.  Behold I will bring them back…  I will gather them from the ends of the world… They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them… For I am a father to Israel.”  In contrast to the mercilessness of the siege, Jeremiah promises a future in which the blind and the lame and mothers with child will walk unhindered over smooth ground.

Jeremiah offers not a cheap optimism sugarcoating reality or excuses for sin and infidelity, but the promise of a future transformed.  It is a future that neither Jeremiah nor his listeners will see within their lifetime.  The exiles won’t return to Jerusalem for another seventy years, so the hope that Jeremiah offers is by no means easy to accept.  In fact, the deepest and most profound promise Jeremiah makes—that the Lord will forge a new covenant with his people—would only be fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Jeremiah’s hope is a demanding hope, and it hinges on a “remnant of Israel,” a people much reduced but faithful and ultimately stronger than the scheming courtiers and sycophantic prophets who called the shots in Jerusalem.  In his vision this faithful remnant becomes an “immense throng.”  Jesus himself speaks of the Church in similar terms when he compares it to the mustard seed—tiny and tough—which grows into an immense plant.  Seeds carry life within them, which sometimes lays dormant even in harsh conditions, until summoned forth, usually by contact with water.  And, indeed, historians of the Bible point out that Israel’s exile in Babylon was a remarkable period in its formation and development as a people.  It was a period in which many of the texts of the Bible itself were consolidated and edited, in which new prophets arose, drawing on the deep wellsprings of their tradition, and called the people to remember who they were—children of Abraham, one-time slaves liberated by Moses, recipients of God’s law, those to whom the Messiah was promised.  The loss of comforts and power, the stripping away of illusion, excuses, and false optimism, perhaps is what allowed Israel to rediscover its identity, for God’s chosen people to see themselves again for who they truly were.  Their story perhaps in some way parallels that of Bartimaeus, whom we meet in the Gospel, whose blindness causes him to call out to Jesus and to express his need in the starkest terms: “Master, I want to see.”

Now you may be thinking, “Jerusalem, Babylon—OK, but what does this have to do with Sweden?”  Sweden is by most measures one of the most secular countries on earth, a prime example of what many would call a “post-Christian society.”  Catholicism was repressed for centuries in Sweden, at times punished by death, with the last legal restrictions removed in 1977.  A month ago, I was in Uppsala and Stockholm to give a couple of talks, and I discovered a Catholic Church full of life and faith, growing steadily.  Mass was standing-room-only; a group of young adults I talked to after Mass, many of them recent converts, peppered me with theological questions for several hours, keeping me up well past my bedtime.  And I thought of the image of the mustard seed.  Many of the young adults I talked to, it seemed, surrounded on all-sides by the aridness of secularism, found in the Church, the Gospel, the sacraments, something like the brooks of water Jeremiah promises to those about to go into exile.

And I realized, as I reflected on the experience, that there is actually a hopeful future for the Church even in “post-Christian societies,” just as, in this very city two thousand years ago, adversity led to faith, the blood of martyrs, as Tertullian put it, becoming the seed of the Church.  I suspect that there is much we can learn from Jeremiah and the remnant to which he preached, urging them to be faithful, to return to who they truly are, to see themselves and the world anew in the light of the covenants God made with their fathers and to pledge themselves to a new covenant—for them in an unseen future, for us visible and present on this altar on which to find deliverance.

Readings: Jeremiah 31:7-9; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

October 27, 2024

Oratorio San Francesco Saverio del Caravita

Rome