Reading Francis

I’m hoping God prefers his prophets to be reluctant and conflicted.

There’s a story from Jeremiah 28 that came up in Monday’s Mass readings and has stuck with me since. I’m no expert on the Old Testament, especially not the prophets, but I’ll do my best to give you an overview.

We tend to think of prophets as fortune tellers, or stock pickers, or talk show pundits, predicting what the future will bring. While it’s true that a lot of what they say is about the future, their primary role isn’t really punditry; to be a prophet is to deliver a message given to you directly by God. Besides the many prophets with books in the Bible, there seem to have been a bunch of others, based on references to groups and classes of prophets that pop up throughout the Old Testament.

Jeremiah was a reluctant prophet with an unpopular message. God sent him to tell the Israelites that, because of their unfaithfulness, they were going to be decimated by the Babylonians. To demonstrate the point, God had Jeremiah make a yoke to wear as a symbol for Israel’s pending enslavement by the enemy. He really didn’t want this message, but when he tried to swallow it, he said that it ate him up “like a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones” (20:9) As Jeremiah predicted, this didn’t go over well with the locals. If you remember the movie A League of Their Own, and the kid who kept taunting the team with “You’re gonna lo-o-se” until Tom Hanks beans him with a baseball glove … that’s not a bad depiction of Jeremiah’s message and its reception. 

Anyway, in Jeremiah 28, another prophet, Hananiah, shows up with a different message. God has changed his mind! Israel’s going to throw off the Babylonian yoke! We’re gonna win!, and to prove it, Hananiah shatters the yoke Jeremiah has been wearing around town.

Jeremiah’s reaction surprised me. Rather than stand in defense of his version of God’s message, he says, essentially, “So be it! Let’s hope you’re right!” (Maybe he was just happy to quit dragging that yoke around.) But he adds, look, if you’re going to prophesy about peace, you ought to know that there’s a scoreboard that will ultimately prove whether you’re right or wrong.

(Hananiah was wrong.)

Yokeless Jeremiah had left, thinking (hoping?) that his prophesying days were done. When you’re released from a job you didn’t want, it can be a great day. But God found him and told him to get back out there and tell Hananiah that, by choosing to make up a message that people wanted to hear, he had ignored what God actually had to say, and he would pay. Israel would indeed suffer under Babylon, and Hananiah would be dead within a year for peddling a false message of hope. Jeremiah obeyed, and Hananiah did in fact die within the year.

The point of the story is not to ignore prophets bearing good news; many of those in the Old Testament, including Jeremiah himself, at a later point, have comforting words from God for God’s people. The point is, if you plan to speak on God’s behalf, you should be aware of the consequences.

This is not just an Old Testament thing. In fact, if you look through the Gospels, one of the few groups of people that Jesus heaps disdain on are those who mislead people by pretending to speak for God. Paul’s letters also include similar warnings for those who claim that their message is actually God’s.

We’ve got a lot of prophets today, too. Look at today’s Christians, and you can find at least two camps of leaders who are selling a message that they claim are from God. On the one hand, some people preach woe to those who refuse to teach and live God’s laws. They rail against a world that claims “I’m OK; you’re OK,” when, they claim, God wants to remind people of all the ways we fall short, so God can help us do better. (Or at least all the ways that other people fall short.) They have lots of Bible verses to back their position.

On the other hand, some people preach woe to those legalists, who fixate on sin and ignore God’s love for all of us, especially the castoffs that are so often ignored. Those legalists are pushing people away from a God who just wants to bring everyone into a divine embrace, they say. They have lots of Bible verses to back their position.

Who is Hananiah here? Who is Jeremiah?

In the first interview Pope Francis gave after his election, he was asked by a Jesuit interviewer, basically, who are you? And his answer, as a fellow Jesuit, was a classic response for a disciple of St. Ignatius of Loyola: I am a sinner that the Lord has looked upon with mercy. A sinner loved by God.

Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis leaned on the back half of that formulation, proclaiming a special jubilee year of mercy and preaching love and forgiveness far and wide. Maybe that’s because that was the message God wanted the world to hear. 

But Francis didn’t paper over the first half of the message, either. He called out sin where he saw it, even when it was unpopular with conservatives, even when it was unpopular with progressives, even as he invited all to repent and accept forgiveness. Maybe that’s because that was the message God wanted the world to hear, too.

I’m with Francis on this. God seems to say repeatedly throughout the Bible “I love you” to the folks who know that they are messed up, broken, incomplete. God also seems to say repeatedly throughout the Bible “you’re broken” to those who believe that they have it all together and are part of the “in” crowd, especially to those who think they know best what God wants. 

Some of us can find themselves in both categories on any given day. More often than not, I feel queasy about writing posts like this. I pray each time I crack open the keyboard for God to either give me a message or give me something else to do.  Honestly, I have shelved more than a few because I didn’t feel enough fire burning in my bones about them. This one sat in Google Doc purgatory for a little while, actually. I’m not interested in being the next Hananiah.

But we’re all called to be prophets sometimes. Me, I trust the reluctant ones more. I can relate.