Jeremiah 26:11-24
Psalm 69-32-38
Matthew 14:1-12
I hate hearing things I don’t like. It must be something physical; almost like tasting something rotten. It is so much better to hear things I do like. This is the appeal of the algorithm, that great monolith that curates digital reality for every single person on the internet. Whatever we click on means that we get more of it, and so our online experience ends up just being whatever we like to click on. We never hear anything we don’t like (unless of course it is something designed to make us upset, which is it’s own barrel of monkeys of sin).
Today we celebrate the holy men and women of the Old Testament. Throughout history, from the Garden of Eden to John the Baptist, there were always people who followed the Lord. Even though the Old Testament is full of naughty so-and-so’s, there are always faithful people keeping the ship upright. Today’s first reading is no different.
Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet”. He warned the people that God was leading the Babylonian army to punish them, but they didn’t listen, and he saw the destruction of Jerusalem. We have his book of prophecies, named after him, and we also have his book of lament over the destroyed city: Lamentations. He told the people something they didn’t want to hear, and instead of doing something about it, they discussed whether they should kill him for it.
And so it goes. There are plenty of things we don’t want to hear. But what if we listened to them anyway? There is a bit of folk-wisdom that might be helpful when listening to something you disagree with: “eat the meat and leave the bones”. There is something praiseworthy about the type of person that can listen to an opinion different to their own and not want to murder the person giving that opinion. So let us train ourselves to be able to listen. You never know what doors God might open if you do.
The other side of this is that we must not be afraid to say things other people don’t want to hear. Or, we must not be surprised when people get upset when we say things they don’t want to hear. This was something God told the prophets more than once: “I’m sending you to tell these people to repent, and they aren’t going to like it, but you have to do it anyway.”
In those sorts of situations we can rest on the words of our Lord, who ended his Beatitudes by talking about people who speak prophetically:
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:11-12)
So let us glorify God in his saints of the Old Testament. Let us pray that he would make us mature people who can hear opinions different to our own. And let us pray that we would have the courage to speak his Gospel truth, even when people don’t want to hear it.