Twentieth Sunday of ORDINARY TIME, Cycle C

First: Jer 38:4-6.8-10; Second: Heb 12:1-4; Gospel: Lk 12:49-57

THEME of the READINGS

"The scandal of truth" could be the title of our reflection on today’s liturgy. The truth proclaimed by the prophet Jeremiah scandalizes his contemporaries (first reading). Jesus’ words on the fire of judgment, on baptism in the blood of the Cross and on the sword that divides, also scandalize his listeners, because they did not correspond to the listeners’ expectations. And aren’t people often scandalized by divine teaching when it resorts to correction and punishment?

DOCTrinal MESSAGE

The scandal of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a sensitive and tranquil man by nature. He loved beauty, and by divine vocation had to preach destruction and horrendous massacres. He loved tranquility and quiet, and found himself totally involved in the risky and unfortunate events in Jerusalem and in the kingdom of Judah. The God who had seduced him induced him to say unpleasant and unexpected things, and to undertake symbolic actions that aroused indignation and adversity. His words and actions scandalized the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah. And "to scandalize" meant, to those who listened to him, that he was not seeking the welfare of the people but their ruin, that he was a pessimist and a spoilsport who disheartened the soldiers and the people. However, Jeremiah knows that he is telling the truth, a truth that he has not invented himself but that he has heard in the intimacy of his conscience as the Word of God. The scandal of truth will make Jeremiah suffer (he will be put into a storage-well full of mud to die there forgotten and abandoned by all). But it does not matter, for he knows that God will not abandon him (he will save him by means of an Ethiopian, a pagan), and that God’s truth which he has conveyed will prevail and triumph. And so it was. Jerusalem was taken and destroyed by the army of Babylon, and most of the population was deported to and enslaved in the land of the winners.

The scandal of Jesus Christ. Jesus addresses his contemporaries with wounding and scandalous words. He talks about the fire of judgment, capable of burning and destroying the present situation to generate a new one, but his listeners are not ready to accept the radical change or the eruption of newness. Jesus talks about baptism with reference to the blood of the Cross, in which he will have to be baptized to wash away the sins of the world which he has taken upon himself. But what is the need for this baptism? Isn’t John’s baptism sufficient, or that of the Essenes? The Cross is a scandal for the Jews, Paul will remind us in the first Letter to the Corinthians. Jesus clearly says that he has not come to bring peace on earth, but the sword that divides men: with Christ or against Christ, with no possibility of being neutral. This sword of division greatly scandalized the Jews. They do not know how to interpret correctly the three signs that Jesus offers his contemporaries, and they are scandalized! The truth that Jesus Christ preaches to them is an unbearable scandal, a scandal that cost Jesus Christ his condemnation and an ignominious death on the Cross.

The scandal of God. Not only Jeremiah, not only Jesus, but God himself may cause a scandal. The community to whom the Letter to the Hebrews was addressed might have thought that it was a scandal that God should allow them to go through so much suffering. They might also have been presented the scandal of martyrdom, the shedding of their own blood. How could God have allowed the forces of evil to intervene in such a manifest way? It is for this reason that the author of the Letter invites the people to keep their eyes fixed on Jesus, who leads them in their faith and brings it to perfection. He endured the Cross, disregarding the shame of it, and has taken his seat at the right of God’s throne. In more colloquial language, we might say, "Are you scandalized? Look at Jesus Christ on the Cross! Are you disheartened by this prospect? Look at Jesus Christ sitting at the right of God’s throne!" In the light of Christ, your scandal will become a witness of faith and glory.

PASTORal SUGGESTIONS

Scandalizing will get something across. I am not recommending immoral scandal, like scandalizing children with evil actions or actions that they do not have the ability to judge. I am proposing the scandal of truth, and truth may not please. It may be more or less appropriate, but it will never be labeled as immoral. I propose that we repeat many times this scandal of truth, so that this repetition may generate at least a question, an incentive, a step forward in the effort to know it. Indeed, isn’t there a whole set of truths that scandalize many people today? For example, the truth of one unique Savior of Humankind, our Lord Jesus Christ, the center and fulcrum of history and the cosmos. There is the truth of one unique Church, founded by Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, or the truth of one unique Creator of the universe and of human beings. We have the truth of a triune God, actively engaged in the history of human beings and their destiny; or the truth of a priestly people, without any distinction based on sex, but of a priestly ministry, to which God calls only men. So many truths: that of marriage, constituted exclusively by the stable union between a man and a woman, or that of the universal destiny of all the goods of the earth, etc. These truths are a scandal to many ears in our society. Rather than keeping them to ourselves, let’s talk about them, let’s tell them now and again, in different ways, with the simplicity and conviction that truth itself entails. Let us speak about them in public and in private: priests, educators, religion teachers, catechists, theologians and bishops. Let us scandalize our society with the fundamental truths of Christian faith and morality!

The truth will set you free. In a social environment in which truth seems to be the cause of slavery and bondage, because both the nature of truth and the human ability for it are ignored or scorned, we Christians are convinced that truth in itself, especially the truth of our faith, sets us free. Actually, all truth contributes to building the person and the Christian in more specific identity and personality. And it is clear that the more we identify with our human and Christian identity, the better and more fully we will experience the true freedom of being what we are meant to be, according to our nature, to what is written in the great book of God’s revelation. The person is not free to be what he wishes: he is free to be the truth of his being. Freedom is not an absolute value, it must be related to truth, which in itself attracts and conquers us. Where there is truth there is freedom, and where truth is lacking, there is necessarily some form of slavery. Are we seeking the truth? Do we live in truth? Do we love truth? Do we defend the truth? Then we may say that we are genuinely free, even if we are closed within the four walls of a prison cell or we are considered "useless material" by society around us. Are we perhaps afraid of the truth, of its conquering power? Yes, in a relative world, perhaps we are afraid of absolute truths. However, if everything is relative, aren’t we turning what is relative into the only absolute? Ultimately, to be afraid of the truth is to be afraid to be one’s self. It means letting one’s self be dominated by the absolute law of the majority, losing human dignity. Truth will set you free. Have no doubts. This is the experience of the great.

Source: http://www.clerus.org/clerus/dati/2004-05/21-13/CICLOC.html by P. ANTONIO IZQUIERDO L.C. (1948-2013)

[참고: 이 파일은 저서명 "가톨릭 교회의 말씀 전례에 따른 성경공부 해설서"(엮은이: 소순태, 출판사: 가톨릭출판사)의 각주의 연장으로 마련되었습니다].