by Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz
“Fear no one,” Jesus tells his apostles in this Sunday’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Hearing that, Peter and Andrew might have wondered, “What have we gotten ourselves into? Maybe we should just go back to catching fish!”
This week we listen in on the instructions Jesus gave before sending the Twelve out to proclaim, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” He warned, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Uh oh!
Speaking the truth — God’s truth — has never been easy. Ask the prophet Amos, chased out of the royal sanctuary at Bethel for prophesying stern words of divine judgment (Amos 7). Then ask the prophet Elijah, called “the disturber of Israel” by King Ahab, who fled for his life from Queen Jezebel’s murderous oath after he defeated the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18-19).
Ask the prophet Jeremiah, whose prayer we read in Sunday’s first reading. When God announced his appointment as “a prophet to the nations,” he objected, “I do not know how to speak. I am too young!” God wouldn’t take no for an answer, reassuring him, “To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:6-8).
God promised the courage Jeremiah would need to bring an unpopular message, warning of impending exile. For this, he faced vehement opposition, his opponents going so far as to dump him into a muddy cistern, hoping he would starve to death there (Jeremiah 38).
Sunday’s first reading is the second part of the last of several prayer-poems in which Jeremiah complains bitterly to God about the predicaments in which he found himself because of his unrelenting fidelity to the prophetic message he was called to deliver. This poem starts with an accusation: “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I must cry out; I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’ For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.” Yet Jeremiah could not hold back: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”
As Jeremiah let it all out in unrestrained lament, he received consolation and renewed resolve: “But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph.” The prayer that began in utter despair concludes in full-throated thanksgiving: “Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!”
Speaking the truth (God’s truth) was never easy for prophets or apostles, and it hasn’t gotten any easier, not even for the pope! Consider the pushback Pope Leo XIV has faced for his commitment to promoting peace and his opposition to violence.
Even so, he perseveres in “Magnifica humanitas,” his first encyclical, his critique of a culture of power and the normalization of war. By God’s grace and the intercession of Peter and all the apostles, may his important words be heard and heeded!
Father Ruiz is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, a professor of theology at St. John’s University, and the vice president of the Society of Biblical Literature