Thursday of the Third Week of Easter

Lectionary: 276

 

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets:

They shall all be taught by God.

Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.

In today’s gospel Jesus cites a teaching from the Prophet Jeremiah, “They shall all be taught by God.” The Catholic translation (NABRE) of Jeremiah 31:33 reads thus:

But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days…. I will place my law within them; and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will no longer teach their friends and relatives, “Know the LORD!” Everyone, from least to greatest, shall know me… for I will forgive their iniquity and no longer remember their sin.

This verse, “All shall be taught by God,” emphasizes the particular relationship of each person with God. And it insists that everyone must come to the Father through Jesus. There is no other god; and there is no other way to know God.

Perhaps it helps to look at the three stages of this development:

First, the earliest Jewish doctrines believed that God had claimed the Hebrews for his own people and wrested them from the pharaohs of Egypt, men who were regarded as gods. He brought them through the Sinai Desert and into the Promised land. In doing so our God proved his superiority over the most powerful gods of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan.

Later, in humiliating exile in Babylon, an Isaian prophet would declare, “There are no other gods!” That’s quite a statement when you consider that the God of the Hebrews should have protected his nation from all other gods. But the prophets insisted he had not been defeated. Rather, he had allowed them to be defeated and driven into exile in punishment for their infidelity.

That's quite a stretch. Those who accept that doctrine accept responsibility for the catastrophe. If they don’t accept it, they abandon the faith and learn to worship other gods. Given the reluctance of people to accept responsibility for their own sins and the sins of their ancestors, I suppose this prophetic doctrine was a bitter pill. (How hard it is for Americans to recognize the  legacy of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow.)

But the doctrine was mysteriously sweetened by the love of Truth. When Ezekiel saw a vision of God enthroned on a heavenly chariot – a vehicle which sped from east to west and north to south at instantaneous speed – he understood that the Lord of Heaven and Earth was not bound by anyone’s geography. By the time of Jesus, Jews were scattered from India to Spain, on the three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Subject to rulers of many different nations, they clung to their belief in the only God who had ever spoken to them.  They also practiced penance for their sins, as the prophets from Moses to John the Baptist urged them.

But, as the parent of any child will tell you today, it is not easy to maintain a minority religion in the face of suspicion, discrimination, ostracism, and occasional persecution. Children want to conform to the expectations of their pals and the dominant society. Only the Holy Spirit can keep them faithful. Distressed parents must have found some reassurance in Jeremiah’s doctrine, “They shall all be taught by God.” The Lord had brought them this far; he would not abandon them.

Into this fraught situation of Jewish cohabitation with gentile neighbors, the message of Jesus arrives: “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.”

A Pharisee might ask, “Do we really need this new teaching? Aren't fidelity to God and observance of the Law enough?”

The Christian must answer, “I receive from the Lord what I handed on to you.” We have been given a further revelation, inviting us into the heart of God. If we expected to find generosity in the King of Heaven and Earth, we are astonished to discover also humility and courage. We could not suppose that God the All-Powerful is courageous until we saw it in the Father’s surrender of all authority in heaven and earth to the Son; the Son’s surrender of himself to the Father through crucifixion; and their pouring the Holy Spirit upon sinful humankind. Receiving that revelation -- that is, being taught by God -- we become the very presence of God in our troubled world.