The cartoon in a recent edition of our local paper The Post caught my attention. It showed a target representing environmental goals crying out to be met. However, New Zealand’s PM is shown with his bow and arrow facing in the opposite direction, his back to the target. Talk about missing the mark!
This stance is common to many political leaders in our world. Rather than embracing policies and practices that will protect the environment, they are making decisions that will further increase the damage being done. It is as if they are deaf and blind to the cry of the earth (and of the poor).
In this, they are like the political and religious leaders at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. The official line given by both political and religious leaders at the time was that the nation is safe, and its safety is guaranteed by the promises of God. Those who benefited from the established order could see no reason for things to change. They promoted the message that all is well and at least for them it generally was. For Jeremiah to talk about the loss of land and temple and the destruction of Jerusalem was seen politically as treason and theologically as a loss of faith in God. He was ordered not to continue with these prophecies. He was not the first and won’t be the last prophet to be silenced.
Jeremiah, on the other hand, was listening to the cry of the poor and to the prompting of God. He could see where things were headed and persistently tried to wake people up to reality. His prophetic task, as described by Walter Brueggemann, was to break through the denial and numbness that had taken hold of the people, reinforced by messages of reassurance from the religious and political leaders.
Denial is a basic defence mechanism in the face of difficulty and tragedy. It can serve a positive purpose in allowing people time and space to come to terms with what is happening. But if people remain in denial, deceiving themselves into thinking “this can’t be happening”, it becomes a problem. In our time, people who try to raise awareness of the threat facing the world because of climate change are dismissed as woke (as though being awake to reality is a bad thing) or labelled as scaremongers (as though alerting people to danger was the wrong thing to do). Expressions like alternative facts, fake news, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories indicate that we are involved in a battle for truthful language that addresses our situation in appropriate ways. Jeremiah too was searching for an appropriate language for this time. What emerges from his search, Brueggemann calls the language of grief. It is a language that allows people to acknowledge and engage their experience of suffering rather than avoiding it. The problem Jeremiah had with those he termed false prophets was that they promised future well-being by bypassing the present experience of anguish. In Christian terms, it is resurrection without the cross.
In our world, where people turn their backs to the cry of the earth, we need again to pay attention to Jeremiah. His ministry of getting people to get their heads out of the sand and face difficult realities has much to say to our time, things we desperately need to hear.
Fr Pat O’Shea lives and works in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban eBulletin
