Today’s readings: Jeremiah 20, 10-13; Romans 5, 12-15; Matthew 10, 26-33.
The fact that so often in life, evil and adversity prevail puts our faith in God to the test. This is the natural reaction. Yet believing that because the Lord is at my side I am untouchable can easily be a fake faith.
Jeremiah, as author Walter Brueggemann writes, notoriously remonstrates with Yahweh about his unbearable prophetic vocation. He was abandoned by his friends who were trying to discredit him. In his extreme prayer, he first accuses Yahweh of seduction, and only afterwards does he turn to confidence in his Lord.
Jesus also speaks in today’s gospel of intimidation but advises “not to be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”. The gospel itself was compiled at a time when the first Christian communities, just as with Jeremiah much earlier, were being constantly intimidated and bullied for what they stood up to. With hindsight, as we read in today’s text, they were revisiting the empowering words of Jesus in the face of adversity.
How can we develop our own resilience in the face of adversity? Is what we preach and teach in our churches and in our proclamation preparing people for life’s difficulties? Are we growing in wisdom when facing the daily struggles of life? It is what kills the soul, not the body, that is to be feared most.
At present we may be going through a really bad patch where our collective conscience is concerned. There have always been difficult times throughout history that gave an apocalyptic sensation. But the worst signs are those that disclose a collective disillusionment and scepticism, emptying the human soul of any hopeful motivation.
This is what Jesus warns about when he says “do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell”. Way back in the 1940s, in his classic The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned about the consequences of debunking the human soul of values and the true meaning of life.
Killing the soul means killing every hope or aspiration; it means killing what we stand for in life; it means renouncing to what gives us identity as a people; for the Christian disciple it means also disowning Jesus. It implies, among other things, not having the bearing of where exactly we are and where we need to go.
Jeremiah and the gospel today serve a good opportunity to help us return to a vital dimension of our collective living. We happen to be at a point in time, I believe, when we should ask ourselves whether the religion we still perpetuate, in the way we live and in the way we still transmit it to the emerging generations, is simply a part of the problem rather than a part of the remedy.
Religion can also be a fake thing. Especially when it surfaces where and when it is convenient, and it dilutes itself and becomes invisible when it can make us feel uncomfortable. The persecution mania did not help in the case of Jeremiah or in the case of the first Christians. And it will not help today.
It is wisdom that should make us face evil and adversity, the wisdom that never gives in to fear, nor manifests itself as presumptuous. In the face of all that is intimidating in the times we live, we need have no complexes of inferiority or superiority. We need though, to examine at the level of our innermost heart, what is it that so easily carries us away and makes our religion look so superficial.
It is high time that we go back to the religion of virtues like coherence, resilience, and inner strength, rather than remain stuck in an outdated and fossilised brand of religion.