Wednesday of Week 16 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Jeremiah 1:1,4-10

As we listen during these weeks to the teachings of the great prophets, we come today to one of the greatest – Jeremiah, from the latter half of the 7th century BC. He was born about 650 BC of a priestly family in Anathoth, a village near Jerusalem. Today we read how, in the year 628, at the age of 22, he was called by God to be a prophet. His life in the service of the Lord will face many hardships. Today we start with hearing about his call.

The first three verses of the first chapter put Jeremiah in his historical context, but we only read the first verse. In the verses omitted, we are told that his call came in the 13th year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah and continued through the reign of his son, Jehoiakim and on until the downfall of Jerusalem under puppet King Zedekiah, a son of Josiah, when the people were brought off into exile to Babylon. In our readings from the books of the Kings, we have met all these people already.

The book opens by telling us that it contains the “words of Jeremiah”, that is, the whole story of his discourses and activities. (There are actually 10 people called Jeremiah in the Hebrew Testament, of whom two were actually contemporaries of our prophet.)

His father, Hilkiah (a common Biblical name, meaning ‘the Lord is my portion’) may have been related to a priestly house going back to the time of King Solomon. Like Ezekiel and Zechariah, Jeremiah himself was both a prophet and priest. We know of two other men in the Bible named Hilkiah, both of them Jeremiah’s contemporaries.

His birthplace, Anathoth, was a village not far from Jerusalem and was named after Anat(h), a Canaanite deity who was goddess of war. Its priestly connections go back to the time of Joshua, the successor of Moses, and Solomon. Abiathar the priest had been sent into exile there by Solomon. Its pagan origins would presumably have been almost forgotten by Jeremiah’s time.

Anata, a town 5 km northeast of Jerusalem, still preserves the ancient name, although it is about 2 km away from the biblical site. Anathoth is described as being in the territory of Benjamin (patriarch and the youngest of Jacob’s 12 sons) and was one of four Levitical towns (recall that priests came from the tribe of Levi). After the Babylonian exile, Benjamites settled there again.

Jeremiah then tells how the word of God came to him. Yahweh says to him:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you…

From all eternity God knew of Jeremiah and, in the very act of creating him, had a call on his unconditional service. In the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians we read a similar description of our own calling:

…just as [God] chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.
(Eph 1:4)

Paul, writing to the Galatians, also speaks of God:

…who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace was pleased… (Gal 1:15)

When God tells Jeremiah, “I knew you”, he means more than an awareness of his identity. To “know” in the Scripture implies a close and intimate relationship which goes beyond the purely mental or intellectual, still less just recognition. In other biblical contexts, the word can also mean to “choose”.

When God says to the prophet, “I consecrated you”, he means more than making Jeremiah holy, but rather equipping him for the work of prophet, to be a spokesman for God with his people. Jeremiah is being called to be a prophet to the nations, but his native Judah, the kingdom of which Jerusalem was the capital, is certainly included among these.

Jeremiah responds to this call with some alarm; like Isaiah, he feels totally inadequate for the task. Moses, too, had many misgivings about being chosen to lead God’s people, and said:

O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue. (Exod 4:10)

Similarly, Jeremiah says:

Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.

And Paul, when he complains of an affliction that he feels makes him less effective as an evangeliser, is reassured that it is precisely his weaknesses which make him a fitting channel for God’s message (see 2 Cor 12:7-10).

Jeremiah’s objection is immediately rejected by Yahweh. He has no cause to fear:

Do not say, ‘I am only a boy…’

Youth and inexperience do not disqualify when God calls. He equips and sustains those he commissions. Timothy is also encouraged when he is told:

Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.
(1 Tim 4:12)

Jeremiah is told, “Do not be afraid” – perhaps one of the most repeated phrases in both the Old and New Testaments, and often heard from the lips of Jesus. Jeremiah will be given what he needs to carry out his mission. He is simply to go to those to whom he will be sent and to say what he is told to say. He has no need to fear because God is with him to protect him.

“I am with you” – God’s promise of his continuing presence should calm the fears of the most reluctant of prophets. “To deliver you” – Yahweh does not promise that Jeremiah will not be persecuted or imprisoned (he will), but that no serious physical harm will come to him.

Then comes the act or rite of commissioning. What is described may have come to Jeremiah in a vision, or the experience is simply being expressed in figurative language. The Lord touched Jeremiah’s mouth and gave him his mission:

Now I have put my words in your mouth.

This describes perfectly the role of the prophet – to be a spokesperson for God. As he had been promised earlier, Jeremiah will be told what he has to say. The prophet does not speak in his own name; he speaks as the messenger of God.

The prophetic mission is then described in both negative and positive terms. He is both to “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow”. But he is also “to build and to plant”. The first two pairs of verbs are negative, stressing the fact that Jeremiah is to be primarily a prophet condemning what is wrong, while the last pair is positive, indicating that he is also to be a prophet of restoration – even if only secondarily. This is the traditional role of the prophet. He is called on to denounce all that is against truth, love and justice. He also exhorts people to convert, to reform and to turn their lives around.

Jeremiah is often seen as a prophet of doom (we call gloomy people ‘Jeremiahs’), but he also had positive messages to bring. We will see that Jeremiah’s hard-hitting words were not welcomed especially by the rich and those in power. He will be attacked and persecuted.

This too is the role of the Church within whose ranks there must always be prophets. These prophets will speak not only to the world, but to their own Church.

We might reflect on who are the prophets in our contemporary Church today? Do we have enough prophets? Does our Church encourage and see the need for the prophetic role? One fact is sure; they are not always welcomed by their fellow-Christians, not least by those in authority. There can also be false prophets and we must carefully discern which is which.

Every baptised person is priest, prophet and king as we share in the mission of Jesus Christ himself, who was, of course, a prophet in the sense we have been discussing. Each one of us has been called from all eternity to do what Jeremiah was asked to do:

…to pluck up and to pull down…to build and to plant.

As we sometimes say, the Church and its members have both to denounce and announce, or, in more colloquial terms, ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. As with Jeremiah, this will not make us very popular with certain groups, but popularity has never been a requirement for salvation.

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Wednesday of Week 16 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 13:1-9

Today we come to the third of the five discourses of Jesus found in Matthew’s Gospel. It consists entirely of the Parables of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Matthew calls it. It might be helpful to go back to Monday of the 10th Week (Ordinary Time) and look again at what is said there about the meaning of the ‘Kingdom of heaven’. Briefly to repeat, we are talking about, not a place and still less a place in the future life, but a network of people and communities who are committed to all that God is and stands for, as revealed to us through the life and teaching of Jesus. The people are those who work to see that God’s will be done on earth, which is the establishment of the Kingdom.

These parables, then, are images that Jesus gives to help us understand how we are to enter into and become part of that Kingdom—of that kingship of God to which we adhere with all our heart and soul.

Our passage begins:

That same day Jesus went out of the house…

What day? And what house? It seems that Matthew is linking the parables of the Kingdom with the scene at the end of chapter 12 (vv 46-50) about those who are on the ‘inside’ and those on the ‘outside’. The house—whose ownership is never referred to, and we know that Jesus had no house of his own—seems to refer to any place where people are gathered together with Jesus.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matt 18:20)

And wherever people are closely related with Jesus, not just physically, but intentionally, that is what it means to be on the ‘inside’, and it is also to be part of the Kingdom.

We are told that the crowds wanting to listen to Jesus were so great that he had to use a boat moored near the shore to speak to them. In the Gospel, the boat often represents the Church or the Christian community from which Jesus continues to speak his message to the world. We are also told that he spoke to them in parables. Once again, Matthew uses his favourite number by having seven of them. Just to remind ourselves: there are 2×7 generations in Jesus’ genealogy; 7 Beatitudes; forgiveness not 7 but 77 times; 7 ‘alas’ in the condemnation of the Pharisees; and his Gospel is divided into seven main sections—infancy, five discourses, passion.

For three days, that is, for the rest of this week, we are going to be considering the first and the longest of the parables, the parable of the sower. First, today, we have the parable itself, then tomorrow some explanation of the role of parables in Jesus’ teaching and, finally on Saturday, an interpretation of the parable.

The parable itself is very straightforward. It speaks about a farmer sowing seed in his field, a typical Palestinian field of the time. It is obviously a very mixed patch of ground. There are paths going across it where people have long established a right of way. There are bits of rock sticking up above the ground with small hollows where water can gather after rain. At that time, ploughing was done after the seed was sown, so there are weeds and brambles growing wild all over the place. And then there are parts of the field which have good, fertile soil.

This image largely describes too the field in which Jesus, the preacher and teacher, is working. It provides very mixed soil, and much of the seed does not go very far in producing fruit. All this has been described in what we have already seen of Jesus’ mission among the people, the religious leaders, his own family—and his disciples. It is these latter who are the fertile soil, these are the ones who will enter, who are already entering the Kingdom.

A parable in the Gospel usually makes just one point. In this case the message is that God’s plan will succeed, even though there seem to be setbacks. It was as important a message for the early Christians to hear as it is for us today. It is a word of encouragement when Christians see how little success they seem to have at times in their evangelising work. The message is not to worry—God’s Word will prevail, and there will always be fertile soil in which to grow and multiply. Indeed, in the past, some communities did fail, but overall the Christian communities grew and the message spread to every corner of the world.

And then there is the final exhortation:

If you have ears, hear!

‘Listening’ and ‘hearing’ are sometimes used interchangeably. In this context, to ‘hear’ is not just to be physically capable of picking up sound. To ‘hear’ presumes attention and awareness; it implies understanding and acceptance and, ultimately, implementation of what is heard.

Am I ready to enter the Kingdom? What kind of soil do I present for the Lord’s Word? Am I really listening to him in the fullest sense?

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