The Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

JEREMIAH 4:11-12, 22-28: Jeremiah's words begin with describing the hot wind from the bare heights of the desert. On certain summer days this wind rose from the heights. Instead of cooling city and people, it heated up until its heat burned nostrils, mouths, and lungs, and consumed the plants and fields over which it whistled. I am sending a wind like this toward Jerusalem, said the Lord, to devour it. I speak judgment upon the city, says the Lord.

Yahweh's estimate of the people is devastating. They are foolish. They do not know me. They are stupid children. They have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil. They do not know how to do good.

The result of this is that creation is undone, piece by piece. As God carefully put the universe together, now God is de-creating it. Formerly the earth had emerged from waste and void; now it is reverting to what is waste and void. Formerly God created the light and then God created the heavens; now the heavens have no light. Formerly the mountains were the unshakeable pillars that held up the earth; now the pillars themselves are shaking. God had filled the earth with the birds of the air and the people of his hand; now the birds are gone, and the people have disappeared. Where there was fruitful land there is now desert, where there were cities there is now waste and destruction. Where God in the covenant had promised to protect the people, now God has withdrawn the covenant and is destroying the people. "The fierce anger of the Lord against his people has done this." Each of these declarations by the prophet are introduced by the words, "I have looked," and that gives this prophecy yet more force:

I have looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.

I have looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.

I have looked, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the air had fled.

I have looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.

"The earth shall mourn, and the heaven above shall be black," says the Lord. "I have spoken, I have purposed, I have not relented, nor will I turn back." In all prophetic literature, there is no more dire prophecy than this one. Jeremiah sees the people in their sin, and because of this he sees Yahweh turning upon them.

There is one glimmer of hope. In verse 27, in the midst of this appalling prophecy, Jeremiah has God saying, "Yet I will not make a full end." Did Jeremiah think that God might yet change his mind? Did some other scribe, in transmitting this text, distressed by these dreadful words, seek to soften them a bit? Is the Hebrew text defective here, as the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia suggests (p. 789), and should the passage read, "The whole land shall be a desolation, and I will make of it a full end"? We can only guess which of these possibilities the mind of Jeremiah might have meant as he recited these words and laid them before the people.

PSALM 14: This psalm is a commentary on the peoples' action: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' And fools are corrupt," the psalm goes on to say. "They do abominable deeds." The Russian novelist Dostoevsky reflected on this. "Without God, everything is possible," he wrote. Dostoevsky meant that God sets limits to our destructive possibilities, and without God we think we can do anything, no matter how immoral it may be. The wars and destructiveness of the passing century underscore the truth spoken both by the novelist and the psalmist. David also lays bare its truth. At the moment of his careless and passionate aggression, as NIB says, David acted as if there is no moral accountability, as if everything was possible for him.

The psalm is talking about moral atheism rather than philosophical atheism. The foolish claim in the psalm that "there is no God" is the failure to trust God and God's goodness. The fool may not deny God's reality; he only denies that God's action affects his life. An old Babylonian phrase described foolishness as "Living by oneself, on one's own resources, without dependence on God." This kind of "foolishness" has worked itself into the fabric of our own culture.

The worst part of this foolishness is that it takes no account of God's care for the poor. "The evildoers eat up my people as they eat up bread," says the psalmist. "You would confound the plans of the poor," he adds. But it will not work. "The Lord is the refuge of the poor." It was Pope Paul VI, I believe, who said that "God has a preferential option for the poor." The psalmist would agree with that. To fail to take the poor into account in human society is to fail to take God into account.

The psalm ends on a note of self-pity. "Would that the Lord would restore the fortunes of Israel and Judah!" Someone, the original psalmist or an editor of the psalms, assumes that Israel and Judah are among God's poor. If this is so, then deliverance for them should come out of Zion. But, given the level of poverty in the world, is it fair for any nation to assume that they are so poor that God should give specific help to them and not to all the others whose poverty calls for God's deliverance? The psalm is closer to the prophetic religion when this last line is omitted.

FIRST TIMOTHY 1:12-17: Let's picture the church thirty years after the death of Paul. Let's see it struggling with survival questions. Can it survive as a living faith without its great leaders around to direct it? Can it fight off the incursions of the old gods of the empire? Can it defend itself against claims that "Paul was not what you say he was. He was not as old-fashioned as you are. He was someone who cast off all semblance of the traditional forms of Jewish faith and struck out on his own, as we are doing." Or can it answer the opposing claims that Paul did not leave us anything to live by, his message was too theological, too abstruse? It was also struggling with questions of organization: what kind of church order needs to be put in place for us to carry on a mission to the world? It was struggling with moral questions: what kind of behavior is demanded of Christians, now that Jesus Christ has died a half century ago? Envision these questions, and we can see the kind of struggles the church was going through in the years 80 and 90 AD.