14th Sunday of Ordinary Time
July 5, 2015
Ezek 2: 2-5
Iona College, N.R.[1]
“Son of man, I am sending you to the
Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me” (Ezek 2: 3).
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| Ezekiel by Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel) |
The Lord chose Ezekiel to prophesy to
Israel—specifically to the people of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah—by
denouncing their idolatry in the last years of the kingdom. He was called and began his mission in 593
B.C. when Judah was already under the rule of the Babylonian Empire and King
Nebuchadnezzar, just a few years before the king and his army utterly destroyed
Jerusalem after a rebellion and took the king, the nobles, the priests, and the
entire middle class population into exile (those whom he hadn’t executed
immediately for provoking the rebellion).
That context adds some irony to the Lord’s complaint about his people’s
rebelling against him.
When the Lord called Ezekiel to prophesy,
he didn’t guarantee him a receptive audience.
Rather, the Lord promised, “Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they
to whom I am sending you” (2:4).
Nevertheless, Ezekiel is to speak to them in the Lord’s name.
Reading that passage, I couldn’t help
thinking of our role as Catholics today.
You probably have heard that when you were baptized and again when you
were confirmed, you took on Christ’s role—his persona, if you will—as priest,
prophet, and king. So what does it mean
to be a Christ-like prophet?
When the Puritans settled New England in
the 17th and 18th centuries, some of their preachers explicitly evoked the
image of Israel traversing the desert to reach the Promised Land. These English settlers, they said, had taken
on “an errand in the wilderness” or the desert of the New World to make it a
new Promised Land for a new chosen people, i.e., for themselves, the Lord’s
true believers.
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| John Winthrop (artist unknown) |
Those Puritans—John Winthrop, William
Bradford, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, et al.—would probably not be pleased
with what they’d observe today in Western society, Western culture: in Europe, Canada, the U.S., even their
beloved Massachusetts. The latest poll
figures from the Public Religion Research Institute report that only 35% of
Americans think the U.S. is still a Christian nation, 45% think it used to be, and
14% don’t think it ever was[2]—that
“shining city on a hill” providing an example of righteousness for all of
humanity. (Ronald Reagan used that
image, but he stole if from the Puritans, who took it from Jesus).
On the contrary, our culture and society
are becoming increasingly hostile to religious faith and practice. You know that. You see that.
20 years ago John Paul the Great was already referring to a culture of
death. We’ve lived thru a sexual
revolution, and we’re experiencing its social consequences. We haven’t turned to Baal and Astarte like
the people of Judah. We worship money,
sex, power, and comfort. None of those
idols are new, of course; people have worshiped them forever. What’s different is that at one time people
knew in their hearts that they were false gods, that such behavior was
sinful. Today they’re believed to be
positive goods, as in the movie Wall
Street: “Greed is good!” Premarital sex is good. A life of glamor and comfort without
responsibility is good. Some would make
abortion a sacrament. The gay movement
today isn’t about seeking toleration or even acceptance but about demanding
approval of that “lifestyle.”
All over the world—not just in the
West—war, violence, and the degradation of human beings thru drugs, slavery,
trafficking, and other forms of oppression only seem to be getting worse. In all of this, we have to be prophets like
Ezekiel (and Jesus).
We have to continue to speak for
chastity—Pope Francis, by the way, did that explicitly when he addressed a huge
youth rally in Turin 2 weeks ago. We
mean chastity before marriage, chastity within marriage. We mean marriage with a twofold natural
purpose of mutual love and support and of openness to the transmission of new
life and the raising of children.
By chastity we mean a respect for the
natural processes of human procreation, as opposed to turning people into
laboratory products thru IVF, embryo selection, etc. We mean a refusal to commodify women (and
children) thru sexual exploitation in pornography, prostitution, and workplace
harassment. We mean helping youngsters
and women make good lives for themselves, reducing their vulnerability to
exploitation, by giving them an understanding of their fundamental dignity and
rights and educating them or training them so that they can support themselves.
We have to be prophets like Ezekiel (and
Jesus) in our defense of human life and human dignity. What John Paul called “the culture of death”
isn’t a specifically Western phenomenon.
We see a love for death in the hatred that produces genocide, in the
nihilism of jihad, in the “disappearances” of people labeled as political
enemies, in drug violence and gang violence.
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| Murambi museum of the Rwandan genocide |
As Christians we continue to prophesy that
every human being is precious, that all human life merits protection—from
conception to natural death.
We continue
to reject abortion as the law of the land, our land or any other; to oppose
what is euphemistically called “death with dignity” but means killing the
inconvenient, the useless, and the hopeless; to call for—at the least—less
recourse to capital punishment, which can’t be justified as a means of
vengeance, of “bringing closure” to a family’s trauma, of evening the balance
of justice, but justified only—if then—as society’s self-defense against
further deadly violence (cf. the recent escape incident upstate, which was,
shall we say, a near-miss on another murder).
We continue to seek paths of peace in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin
America, however difficult, seemingly impossible, those paths are; we saw the
Holy Father doing that recently with the Palestinian Authority. We continue to aid refugees—the U.N. now
estimates there are nearly 60 million of them who’ve fled war, famine, natural
disasters, or economic disasters. We
continue to support education and Third World development—these too are part of
the culture of life. In Laudato si’, the Holy Father places a
strong emphasis on everyone’s fundamental right to clean water; that’s a
development issue, and it’s a life issue.
We insist that everyone be treated with respect: immigrants and refugees, minorities, gays, men
and women, seniors and children, the physically and mentally handicapped, the
homeless, political opponents, even stupid drivers on our streets and cashiers
who don’t seem to know what they’re doing.
Pope Francis’s encyclical imitates
Ezekiel’s prophesying: it takes on
issues that upset both so-called conservatives and so-called liberals. We hope that we, the new Israel, will pay him
heed and not be “hard of face and obstinate of heart,” e.g., when he challenges
our throwaway culture, our rampant consumerism, and our indifference toward
developing nations. His letter is
addressed to all of us, not just to politicians, diplomats, economists, and
captains of industry. In this area, too,
we can be prophets like Ezekiel, by taking to heart what Francis proposes and
making it part of our lives.
Pray, dear sisters and brothers, that the
Spirit of the Lord may enter you and me and lay hold of us as it did Ezekiel,
and set us on our feet (cf. 2:2) to live out our calling to be, priests, kings,
and prophets in the image of Jesus.
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