What are we to make of religious wild cards? What are we to make of men and women who don’t fit in, who passionately and dangerously pursue their own vision, who challenge the status quo, who see things differently from the rest of us, who wont compromise, who live on the margins, and who are often said to be eccentric or anarchic, fanatical or even mad?
What are we to make of people who refuse to take seriously the standard answers, the political slogans, the values of their society; those who are deeply critical of their religious leaders, who accuse their co-religionists of hypocrisy or complacency?
And what if such people turned out to be our own children?
We do not know what Jeremiah’s father thought of his son’s career as a prophet. But Jeremiah fell into the category of the religious wild card – it is part of the definition of being a prophet. He lived his prophetic life for forty years in the tragic period leading up to and including the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah and its capital and its temple in Jerusalem. He consistently opposed the nation’s leaders, he faced bitter opposition, imprisonment, and public disgrace as a so called traitor.
He castigated those who kept insisting on national values: the Temple, the Land, and the peace of God. He outraged people by suggesting that God wanted them to submit to the Babylonians and not form alliances with their ancient enemy the Egyptians. And he preached that piety without justice was empty. The quality of the people’s worship was to be tested by their adherence to the moral injunctions of the law.
Jeremiah is one of those Jewish figures whom as Christians we also inherit. But he is not one of those prophets who like Isaiah provide us with beautiful and memorable poetry for Christmas and Holy Week. If you look at the Oxford Dictionary of quotations you will find 93 entries for Isaiah and only 18 for Jeremiah. And those quotations are not comforting. They are all spoken in the words of the angry, indignant, isolated man who alone seems to find delight in the thought of God’s demands and God’s promises.
St Paul was not a prophet. His message was apostolic. He converted and gathered together small groups of people and forged them into a new community, whose faith he inspired and whose way of life he guided. His guidance as we hear it in Romans is for a small as yet relatively insignificant community; and yet the remarkable aspect of that guidance is the instruction to bless your persecutors, and not repay evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. All the other instructions we heard this morning had to do with the internal life of the community. They are primarily about how Christians are to treat one another; but the instruction to bless your persecutors obviously relates to life in relation to the outside world. The people of other faiths who stir up trouble for these new Christian groups and the local Roman authorities who may imprison and torture them – all of them are to be blessed.
And that wild card message of non resistance is unexpected in the Roman world and the world of other faiths. It is a message which relates directly to the teaching and example of Jesus himself. People regarded Jesus as a prophet and so he was, besides being a lot more. Like Jeremiah, Jesus warned the people of Jerusalem that their city and temple would be destroyed, like Jeremiah he suffered opposition, mockery and imprisonment. Like Jeremiah Jesus taught that his people were not to oppose their imperial enemies.
At first his disciples could not accept the obvious implications of all this; they could not accept that Jesus foresaw his own death. They could not accept that the fundamental message in Jesus teaching is that our relationship to this world is one in which in some way or other we have to take risks with our lives. There is Jesus says, a permanent danger in our relationship with the world – the things that everyone takes for granted in the societies in which we live may in fact endanger the life of our very souls.
What that means, every Christian has had to work out for him or herself ever since. It is the prophetic call to every church – are your values the values of the gospel or of the world and where do those Christian and secular values leave no room for each other? Some have interpreted that prophetic call in terms of a social gospel. Others have thought of it as more personal and spiritual, relating to my own resistance to temptation. In the end there is I suspect no clear distinction between those two interpretations. It is not possible to shut my own inner world off from the world around me.
So what will a prophet really look like in our own day? How is the Christian wild card to be played? A contemporary Islamic wild card is to be seen in the jihadist desire to create a caliphate in which everyday life for everyone is ruled entirely by the Koran. The main reason why Christians cannot seek a society ruled by the gospel is that their faith tells them that it is not possible. A prophet preaches the building of a better society; but a prophet like Jesus is suspicious of all earthly fulfilment. All Christian communities are provisional and can only hint at the life of the kingdom; that is why we pray ‘Thy Kingdom come’ – the perfect society is entirely in the hand of God.
And that is why a Christian prophet has such a hard time. All he or she can say is, ‘This is wrong.’ It is your task to find a way that might for the time being put things right, make things better. A prophetic church will at one level therefore look like a pessimistic church – a negative church. And we don’t like to look like that. We don’t want to give offense. We want people to think of us as happy, friendly, caring, wise and considerate people, contributing to the well being of society. But the church needs its prophets not to be like that.
The church needs some people to say, you must not think like that, you cannot allow that to continue, you cannot accept this, you must not pay for that, this, this and this are wrong, and wicked and dangerous and ultimately evil. And if we are mocked, or laughed at or gagged so be it. It was Satan who spoke through Peter when he said to Jesus, ‘This must never happen to you.’ Amen