Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, Over the great destruction which overwhelms the virgin daughter of my people,over her incurable wound.

If I walk out into the field, look! those slain by the sword; If I enter the city,look! those consumed by hunger. Even the prophet and the priestforage in a land they know not. (Jeremiah 14:17-24

Today’s first reading from our lectionary is a classic picture of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 598 BC, from the Prophet Jeremiah. The dead still wait to be buried, people are starving for food, prophets and priests wander about bewildered by what’s happened. 

Just as important as the description of the devastated city is Jeremiah’s reaction to it. He’s no distant onlooker, he’s there, part of it all, and his eyes are filled with tears, day and night.

That’s Jeremiah. It’s his city and his people that have been struck “a blow that cannot be healed.” Instead of the Babylonians or the Judean leaders whom he had warned, Jeremiah addresses God. “You alone have done all these things.”

Does Jeremiah have something to say about our situation today?

“Nowhere else in the Old Testament does the eternal, invisible God become so involved in human experience and communicate within it as in the person of Jeremiah,” Fr. Carroll Stuhlmueller, CP, writes in his commentary on Jeremiah in the Catholic Study Bible.

Jeremiah  struggles with God. He “paradoxically combines exceptional obedience to God with vigorous argumentation against God, he struggles with doubt and anger, and at times succumbs to them, only to be purified and transformed (Jer. 9:1; 15:19).”

There are no quick answers for him, Fr. Carroll writes: “The biblical message comes  not simply as a finished polished discourse, but as an intuition, or to use Jeremiah’s words , as ‘fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones’ ( Jeremiah 20:10). Jeremiah frequently provides us with a message on its way to becoming the final word of God, struggling to come to birth and seeming lost in the dark birth canal. “(Jeremiah, 20:17) (Reading Guide 304-305)

As we look at our own world in the grip of a devastating wars, climate change, global pandemics, what about Jeremiah’s words to God: “You alone have done all these things.” 

I think we struggle like him. 

For the next week or so, we’re reading the Prophet Jeremiah from our lectionary. Born about 650 BC, Jeremiah spoke to a nation in its final days before the Babylonians captured Jerusalem and took away its leading citizens into exile in Babylon in 598 BC. He looks downcast in Michelangelo’s portrait. He was.

Jeremiah wasn’t accepted during his lifetime. Discredited, arrested and imprisoned by his enemies, he urged religious reform and wise political alliances to Judea’s kings and leaders. His influence grew only after his death as the exiled Jewish community in Babylon reflected on his words and actions. 

Jeremiah influenced the prophets Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah 40-66, and some of the psalms. He remained in Jerusalem after its destruction and later was forced into exile in Egypt where he died, but there is no information about his death.

Our reading for Thursday from Jeremiah is a good summary of his message to Israel:

You were “as a bride following me in the desert…I brought you to a ‘garden land’ which you defiled,” the Lord says to the people of Jerusalem. “Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters. They have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water. “  (Jeremiah 2:1-3, 7-8, 12-13)

A “garden land” — symbol for Jeremiah of God’s promise — comes from the Book of Genesis. God first gave humanity life in a garden. Now it’s offered again, but the “garden land” can be refused. 

“Living waters” also is a favorite symbol of prophets like Jeremiah. The person who is just is like a tree planted by living waters, Psalm 1 says.  A just people grow by God’s living waters.

“With you is the fountain of life, O Lord”, our responsorial psalm says today. 

Jeremiah is mentioned in Matthew’s gospel when Jesus asks Peter “Who do people say I am?”  They say you are Jeremiah or one of the prophets, Peter responds.  (Matthew 16:14) Selections from Jeremiah are read in the lectionary in the 16th to the 18th weeks of the church year, year 2, as the readings from Matthew describe Jesus facing opposition as he begins his ministry in Galilee.

In lent and Holy Week we read Jeremiah as Jesus faces betrayal and death at the hands of his enemies. 

Readings from Jeremiah occur in our Sunday readings, usually in the same context. He’s found also in the church’s morning prayers: Jeremiah weeps over a desolate land after Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians.  ( Jeremiah 3 10-14, Friday Morning, 3) The prophet proclaims God’s promise of a “garden land” . (Jeremiah 14 17-21, Thursday Morning 1)

Born in Lebanon, Sharbel Makhlouf was brought up in a tight knit village community high up in the mountains by an uncle who didn’t approve of his love of prayer and solitude and had other plans for him. Sharbel broke from family and village to enter the monastery of St. Maron where he became a monk and then a priest.

Then, following the example of the desert saints, Sharbel became a hermit, distancing himself further for the next 23 years from the society he lived in.

But like the desert saints– like St. Anthony of Egypt who attracted others into the desert by his life of prayer and solitude– Sharbel became a trusted guide and friend to those who came to the small rooms he provided in his hermitage for those seeking his wisdom.

They found him free from the lure of success, the love of money, the demands of society and family expectations. He reminded them of what’s above all: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Moslems as well as Christians sought him out and honored him. He is an important source of unity in a region, Lebanon, where the two worlds live closely together.

Many miracles occurred after his death. Pope Paul VI said of him at his canonization in 1988: ” May he make us understand, in a world largely fascinated by wealth and comfort, the paramount value of poverty, penance and asceticism, to liberate the soul in its ascent to God.” Pope Leo chose Lebanon as one of the first churches to visit after becoming pope.

The Maronite Church has always been an eastern Christian church allied to Rome.

“Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field, ” his disciples ask Jesus. (Matthew 13:36-37)  Why do they want him to explain this parable about the weeds in the field before any other parable, we wonder ? What’s so important about it?

The parable, about a man and his servants who plant wheat, immediately follows Jesus’ opening parable of the sower in Matthew’s gospel. Once the wheat’s planted, they’re ready to go to sleep. All’s done; they have only to wait for the harvest.

But it won’t be so: an enemy comes and plants weeds in the wheat field. You can hear the servants’ distress as they wake up to it. They weren’t expecting this. Their immediate response is to go and pull the weeds up. 

Like the rocky ground Jesus describes in the parable of the sower, they hear the word and receive it with joy, but “when some tribulation or persecution comes because of the word” they fall away. (Matthew 13:20-21) They’re overwhelmed by the sight of weeds.

Were Jesus’ disciples like them at this point in Matthew’s gospel? The pharisees were bent on putting Jesus to death. They’ re joined by the Herodians, the followers of Herod, ruler in Galilee. The cities that first received Jesus with joy now are rejecting him now. His own family wish him to abandon his mission.

His disciples envisioned a wheat field; now they see a world of weeds. And so they ask Jesus:  what’s this is all about? 

Not just Jesus’ immediate disciples wonder about what they’re seeing, others do as well. We celebrate the Feast of the Apostle James July 25th. , Matthew described the mother of James and John appealing to Jesus for a privileged place in his kingdom. She saw a wheat field on the horizon. Jesus reminded her and her sons it’s a field of weeds as well.

Perhaps Matthew’s gospel also has the Galilean world of his day in mind, where the disciples of Jesus become overwhelmed by a resurgent Judaism led by the pharisees? Let’s go further; as we see today a church in decline in the west and a world split into factions, do we have a similar vision of things? We live in a field of weeds!

Parables raise questions and give answers. The parable of the weeds and the wheat proclaims, first of all, God’s confidence in the seed he has sown. Our world will never be a perfect wheat field, but it won’t become a field of weeds. We can’t eradicate every evil we see. As Jesus teaches today: we have to leave this world to the judgment of God.

The parable calls into question the way we look at life. Just weeds? No wheat? Or do we see both. Do we trust in the Sower who has sown wheat? 

As we read this parable, the Lord comes to us as wheat. Ignatius of Antioch once said “I am God’s wheat.” And so are we.