Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 14, 2022 – Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

For many years I was friends with a family. The mother and father were estranged from their son because their son had married someone of another faith. Actually converted to that faith himself for the sake of his wife.  And so for years, they had little, if any, contact with their only grandson. Only after many long years, did the ice begin to melt just a little bit and every now and then in some public place, like a big restaurant, they would meet for a brief moment of reconciliation.

Religion can be very divisive. That’s why I said to pay attention to the group that wears white hats in one reading and black hats in the other. The Letter to the Hebrews is not really a letter so much as it is an essay, an explanation. In the year 68, the Roman Legions surrounded Jerusalem and laid siege to it for two years. Jerusalem was able to hold out for a long while because it had a wonderful water source and abundant food, but eventually the inhabitants began to weaken and the Legions were able to break through the walls and they set the great Holy City of the Jewish people on fire. Both Jews and Jewish Christians ran for their lives.

Remembering that, the writer of the Book of Hebrews challenge is to explain to Jewish Christians that they no longer needed the temple they no longer had. For the first couple of decades after the resurrection of Jesus, Jews who believed in him continued to go to Temple and, although they were considered heretical Jews by proper Jews, they still were welcome in the Temple.  All Jews were welcome in the temple. But once it was destroyed, what were they to do? They didn’t realize yet that the Eucharist they were celebrating in their homes was not only a sacrament but also the sacrifice.

And so, the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tries to explain to them that they have something better. They no longer need to look backward, but he uses their history. He says you have a great cloud of witnesses cheering you on. Who is that cloud of witnesses?  They were not yet huge numbers of Christian martyrs and saints.  He is referring to the great heroes of the Old Testament who are saying, “Yes, you found the Messiah. Go for it.”  So these are the Jews as white hats.

Twenty more years go by, and the Church is a very different Church to whom Luke is writing. He is writing to a Church largely of Pagan Christians. And there is a tension, in the Church of the 80’s, between Jewish Christians who have given up so much to follow Jesus. They have been shunned by their Jewish relatives and friends. And they are being asked to worship with people whom they were taught were unclean. In Luke’s time, the majority of converts to Christianity were from the slave ranks of pagan Rome and pagan Carthage and pagan Athens. And this is a very uncomfortable kind of thing with people resenting one another. The worst part of it all was that those Jews who did not recognize Jesus as Messiah had found a new strength in their privileged position in the Roman Empire and began to stir up trouble in this town and that, by turning the Roman magistrates against the Christians in their town. And so, now we have the same group of people, wearing black hats. 

Religion can be very divisive. Almost all of us know of a story someplace in our family where someone has said to someone else over the question of religious tradition, “You are dead to me.”  The son or daughter who marries someone of a different faith or no faith at all.  The children who fail to have their own children baptized. It happens all the time. What are we to make of it? Well that’s why we need the first reading.

I said to pay close attention to who it was who rescued Jeremiah. You have to understand the political and religious situation in today’s story. Every King had, in his court, in his entourage, prophets who would tell him what he wanted to hear. Yes men, who claimed they were speaking in the name of God. King Zedekiah was faced with a difficult choice. There were two pagan powers which were inimical to each other but also had their sights set on the territory that Zedekiah ruled. And so, he made an alliance with one against the other. You know, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, my friend’s enemy is my enemy, and that sort of thing. And he was encouraged to do that by the court prophets. Jeremiah saw it differently. He said, “When you make an alliance with pagan people, you are violating the covenant law and you will pay the price for it.”  Now, the problem was Jeremiah going around Jerusalem saying that was that he seemed to be a traitor, and the military resented it because it weakened the resolve of the soldiery. And so they wanted him out of the way.

Zedekiah was a weak King and moved with the flow. You know that old thing about whether a car is a Toy-ota or a To-yota? Well, you can say the word Zedekiah two different ways. You can say Zeda-kay-uh or you can say Zeduk-yah. Because his name means Yahweh-Yah – “Yahweh is my strength.” Zedekiah no longer believed that Yahweh was his strength and Jeremiah was calling him to task.

So he gets thrown in a cistern to die. Get him out of the way.  Who comes to his rescue?  A guy named Ebed-Melech, the Cushite. That means nothing to us. You have to know where Cush was. If you look at a modern map, Cush is now the southern Sudan. Southern, below Egypt. So Cushites were definitely pagans. Had no interest whatsoever in Judaism. How did he wind up in Zedekiah’s court?  He was probably a slave or perhaps an emissary of the Cush people. But, either way, he was a non-Jew serving a Jewish King.  Not only that, but he was a non-white person serving in that court. The Cushites, even today, are people of color. And so, the person who comes to Jeremiah’s rescue is an outsider. Someone considered unclean. Someone considered beneath everybody else.

The question Catholics need to ask themselves is whether it’s better to stand your ground when family and friends go a different way or to go along in order to get along. What profit is there, what value is there, in making an issue and alienating people who love you and whom you love?  What good does that do for anybody or for even for anybody’s relationship with God? On the other hand, what good does it do if you allow people to go their own way and stand by them and hope for the best? The good it does, is to preserve the bonds of friendship and affection from which greater good can come.

For twenty-first century Christians, the question is not, do I refuse to accept this marriage because it doesn’t follow my faith, or do I refuse to accept this family because they didn’t have their kids baptized, but do I simply pay close attention to my own principles and make sure that I believe what I say I believe and to make sure that my principles, the things that I hold dear, are the same things Jesus does.