Saturday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 1, 2020

The Feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori

Jeremiah 26:11-16, 24

The priests and prophets said to the princes and to all the people, “This man deserves death; he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your own ears.” Jeremiah gave this answer to the princes and all the people: “It was the Lord who sent me to prophesy against this house and city all that you have heard. Now, therefore, reform your ways and your deeds; listen to the voice of the Lord your God, so that the Lord will repent of the evil with which he threatens you. As for me, I am in your hands; do with me what you think good and right. But mark well: if you put me to death, it is innocent blood you bring on yourselves, on this city and its citizens. For in truth it was the Lord who sent me to you, to speak all these things for you to hear.”  Thereupon the princes and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, “This man does not deserve death; it is in the name of the Lord, our God, that he speaks to us.”  So Ahikam, son of Shaphan, protected Jeremiah, so that he was not handed over to the people to be put to death.

“The priests and prophets said to the princes and to all the people, ‘This man deserves death.’ ”  If we did not already know that these words occur in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, we could reasonably assume that they were taken from one of the Gospels.  Now, while Isaiah prophesied much about the Messiah through his words, Jeremiah did so in his deeds, in his virtues, and in his sufferings.  Paying close attention to Jeremiah helps us to see the Lord as he was seen by many of his contemporaries, who thought that he was Jeremiah come again (cf. Matthew 16, 14): the brazen outsider who ceaselessly preached repentance and who challenged the corrupt authorities in Jerusalem; the prophet hunted, mocked, and slandered by those same authorities; the man of God who taught about the coming of God’s wrath.  There are those today who would see the Lord Jesus as a traveling folk singer, as a gentle story teller, but that was not how the people of his own time saw him.  Jeremiah helps is to see this.

“It was the Lord who sent me to prophesy against this house and city all that you have heard.”  Jeremiah defends himself here, just as Jesus defended himself against the Sanhedrin on the night of his arrest, protesting that he has acted merely as the voice God was using to warn his people to repent.  Jeremiah is declaring that he seeks nothing for himself in this, and is making no personal threats.  He is doing the work the legitimate prophets had always done, and which Moses himself had done.  “Now, therefore, reform your ways and your deeds; listen to the voice of the Lord your God.”  The ministry of Jesus largely consists in this message: “Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4, 17).  As if to say, Do penance, for the kingdom of this world is ending and the kingdom of heaven has approached.

“As for me, I am in your hands; do with me what you think good and right.”  We see here the utter surrender of Jeremiah before the priests and the people.  He is able to make it because he long ago surrendered himself completely to God, and had continuously renewed that surrender throughout his life.  This public giving up of his life is convincing proof to the crowd that his words are the words of God.  This is the authentic life to which we are called as Christians: to live as Christ lived so that people may believe in Christ through us.  “If you put me to death, it is innocent blood you bring on yourselves, on this city and its citizens.”  The Lord Jesus might have replied in the same way when the descendants of these same priests cried out for his crucifixion.  To which they would have responded, “Let his Blood be upon us and on our children.”  

“For in truth it was the Lord who sent me to you, to speak all these things for you to hear.”  St. John in his Gospel quotes Jesus as essentially saying this several times.  And as the Lord Jesus said to his Apostles, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20, 21), so these should be our words as well.  Our lives are to be lived as witnesses to the Father.

“This man does not deserve death; it is in the name of the Lord, our God, that he speaks to us.”  This reminds us of how even members of the Sanhedrin struggled amongst themselves to form an opinion about Jesus (cf. John 7, 50-52).  “So Ahikam, son of Shaphan, protected Jeremiah, so that he was not handed over to the people to be put to death.”  The princes and the people took Jeremiah’s side against the priests and the prophets, prefiguring how the Jews would be split on Jesus: “There arose a dissension among the people because of him” (John 7, 43), and, “They [the Pharisees]  feared the multitudes, because they held him as a prophet” Matthew 22, 46).  Note that the people supported Jeremiah even though he had spoken God’s warning to them, on the principle that he had spoken “in the name of the Lord”.  Even in their sin, they recognized God’s voice.  In the end, Jeremiah was protected and housed by a man named Ahikam, whose father had been a scribe, therefore a prominent official, in the court of the devout King Josiah some years before.  While from an important family, Ahikam’s intervention entailed a certain personal risk, and this helps us to understand the Lord’s words: “He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet, receives a prophet’s rewards” (Matthew 10, 41).  A prophet will always be persecuted, and those who assist him share in his future glory.  If we receive the Lord of the prophets in our hearts and defend him against his enemies, then we shall share his his eternal glory.