22nd Sunday A
Jeff Bagnall • 1 September 2023
It's not so long ago that we were reading of Elijah wanting to die because of his failure to inspire the people and because of a death-threat against him. Jeremiah was in a worse situation in Judah around the 7th century BC. In that land, regard for Yahweh and the Covenant was almost entirely abandoned, and God urged Jeremiah to preach about the inevitable political demise and eventual national disaster. He had a respite from his work for a short time during the reign of Josiah; for this king tried to reintroduce the recognition of the Law of God as found written in what we now see as the early books of the bible, especially Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But this reform soon failed, and idolatry and fertility cults regained popularity.
Despite extreme reluctance, Jeremiah began the work of his calling, which was to bring him general disfavour, occasional imprisonment or confinement and continued unpopularity. There was some upbeat aspects to his message at times, particularly the one about God wanting to set up a new covenant within the hearts of the people. He suffered a tormenting turmoil in his own life; it resulted both from his natural abhorrence of preaching against his own people and from the deep and inescapable inner compulsion to undertake the vocation given him by God – announcing the people's downfall. Doing God’s will is not always an obviously good thing! Our reading
is his outcry at this personal conflict within him.
The second reading follows nicely from the thoughts of the Old Testament situation of Jeremiah. You mustn’t conform to the laxity of morals that there may be in the world of your experience, Paul writes to the Romans; there is a spiritual depth to your being that calls you to commitment to the will of God. It is calling for a sacrifice – surrendering what you might be attracted to. You do this to live in a more elevated way – a way that recognises God’s purpose for human life. The apparent contrast between body and spirit is not the duality of body and soul that many think of, but rather the difference between what I fancy for myself and what God wants to make of me – contrast flesh and spirit. However it is really the difference between God’s will for what He creates to be good and perfect, and the nothingness from which it is raised by Him.
We are at the point in Matthew’s gospel when Peter has just expressed the belief that Jesus is the Messiah expected by the Jews with the anticipation of liberation from Roman dominance and superiority over all the nations. Also Jesus, according only to Matthew’s gospel, has told Peter that he will have a leading role in the new kingdom. It is this that turns out to be the community of Christians that exists at the time of this gospel’s composition. But this wasn’t at all the kind of kingdom and leadership that Peter actually imagined it would be.
In the gospel stories it is at this stage that Jesus begins to speak plainly about the problems that He foresees will come upon Him because of the life He is leading and the message He is preaching – a whole new attitude to religious observance and a view of God as a spiritual liberator full of kindness and forgiveness. This message and belief in it will inevitably bring trouble and difficulty – in the secular aspect of life though not in one’s inner being. It is the contrast between these two areas of life that is the subject of Jesus’ words in our gospel for this day.
Jeff Bagnall was a lecturer for many years at Craiglockhart College teaching RE to many future Catholic Primary teachers.
The first reading is from a section of the book of Amos ( 6:4-10 ); it is introduced with the opening words of the chapter: “alas for those who are at ease in Zion.” Strong words against the city dwellers come from Amos, the country fellow – words and woes against the northern kingdom of Israel. We hear the third and last woe against the excessive luxury in which they are living although their prosperity is declining visibly; they seem to live for the moment and care little of the future, even their own. They are, unusually, referred to as a group under the eponymous name of Joseph; this could be because of the account of Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream (Exodus 41) of seven years of plenty followed by seven of crop failure, and his wise management under the Pharaoh of storing up supplies for the future. The exile that will come will be the disaster that follows this decadence. In the second reading ( 1 Timothy 6:11-16 ) Timothy is addressed as a ‘man of God.’ Unlike the people of the first reading and in contrast to those addressed in this letter just before this section, Timothy is chosen and enabled by God to be a minister in the Christian community. Paul’s athletic imagery appears here also, saying “compete well,” that is, ‘run the race’ or ‘fight the good fight.’ The Christian at baptism made confession that “Jesus is Lord”, and Jesus made a similar confession before Pilate according to John’s gospel (18:37); Timothy was baptised but was also a leader in some way, and that meant not to be a covert Christian but to speak the truth even before accusers, as Jesus did before Pilate; the writer could be referring to either of these situations. The requirement to keep the commandments or ordinances is most likely not to the ten commandments of the Jewish religion but to the requirements of being a Christian or, more likely, the specific orders for acting as a minister. He must act as a servant of the King who will eventually appear, and he must be selfless in his work towards the kingdom of God. In today’s gospel reading from Luke ( 16:19-31 ) we have the parable often call that of Dives and Lazarus; but ‘dives’ is just the Latin word for rich man. In many ways the story is straightforward once we accept the different understanding of the afterlife that it portrays. However, whereas the rich man is anonymous, the beggar at his gate is named Lazarus. Luke is writing about 40 years after the resurrection of Jesus but still there are people who aren’t believers; and John’s gospel, uniquely, has the story of the raising of Lazarus which Luke’s readers may have known; but Luke’s point is not about accepting the truth of the resurrection, of Jesus or of Lazarus, because believing is more a way of living than accepting facts – of loving God and your neighbour as yourself, which the rich man in the parable didn’t do.
The Sunday readings only use the prophet Amos three times; this and next Sunday are two of those. Amos was a country man used to living a simple life: a herdsman tending sycamore trees. Somehow he came to be a prophet of God in the city of Bethel, though he wouldn’t claim the title of prophet and was different from most of them. Such a man coming from the country to the big and prosperous city just had to speak what he thought in order to deliver a ‘scolding’ from the Lord, for the hiking of prices, lowering of measures and fixing of scales (Amos 8:4-7). His natural reactions to the corruption that he saw is described as visions from God, and they are nearly always expressed with an impressive literary style: matching couplets and triplets. Yet it is the language of wrath and condemnation, though elsewhere Amos does tell of a remnant few who will be spared and at the end of the book there is a very positive prophecy though this ‘epilogue’ may have been added later to end on an upbeat note of hopefulness.