Word to the Wise
Saturday, August 2, 2008 - Saturday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
[Jeremiah 26:11-16, 24 and Matthew 14:1-12]"This man does not deserve death; it is in the name of the Lord, our God, that he speaks to us."
One of the sad but true things about a prophet is that even when people recognize who he is, that still doesn't protect him. The priests and prophets want to put Jeremiah to death because he was preaching against them and the whole culture. When Jeremiah responds to their charge, the people rescue him. However, he winds up being thrown down a well! (Much later on he would be assassinated, according to tradition.) John the Baptist criticized Herod over Herod's marriage to his own sister-in-law! This resulted in his being thrown into prison. Herodias, the sister-in-law, bided her time and when the magic moment came, she had her daughter ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Purely to save face because of his drunken promise, Herod had John beheaded! No matter how one looks at it, the words quoted from Jeremiah above sum up the situation. Why kill the messenger? We all know why. We think the only way we can get rid of the challenging words and guilt-inducing denunciations is to shut up the messenger. However, as St. Paul says, "There is no chaining the word of God." We can destroy human messengers, but we cannot destroy God. What we wind up doing by ignoring prophets or killing them is to destroy ourselves. After all, it is in the name of the Lord, our God, that they speak to us! AMEN
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