Jeremiah was a nag. Not to be irreverent, but he insistently chided countrymen about getting back to the covenant and abandoning the gods and idols of Israel’s pagan aliens and neighbors. People got tired of it. They saw him as a holy man, a prophet who spoke for God an authoritative teaching. Trouble was, God’s word was too harsh for them. The word “prophet” comes from the Greek “pro,” for, and “phanein,” to speak. God’s spokesman had too uncomfortable a message for them. So he ended his career as did most prophets, violently rejected by his audience. He landed at the bottom of a well.
Jesus also antagonized his listeners. Read the whole 23rd chapter of Matthew:
“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees! You gag on a gnat but swallow whole a camel!”
They could nit-pick over some inconsequential rule but completely ignore a major value. So the religious establishment did the unthinkable to conspire with the hated occupation forces of Pilate and silence him, violently. Jesus’ death came as no surprise to anyone.
Journalists for social justice can also rankle people, driving them to write angry letters.
Where do they get off, presuming to speak for God or anyone? Why is their opinion better than anyone else’s? At least Jeremiah and Jesus had the reputation of holy man. Who knows about these ink-stained kvetches?
People hear a criticism of something dear or important to them. It calls for a reform or a change of some kind. It means that a value frequently used has to be abandoned and substituted with something new. Letting go of the idols in Israel meant abandoning deities that just might deliver if petitioned long enough. Letting go of the casuistry and legalisms of the Pharisees, who could justify ignoring aged poor parents by dedicating one’s property as “korban,” (or exempt from one’s duty to the fourth commandment to honor one’s parents), was allowable.
One such angry missile, or missive, arrived a few months ago. It responded to a column on the greed absolutely rampant in our declining, fading nation, the greed that brought down our economy and that of the world, all by itself. Capitalists have devised an economic system of mortgage-backed securities, securitized debt, “ninja” mortgages (no income, no job or assets), swaps — and all with the complicity of regulators who famously stopped regulating, trusting that the greed flood would wash us all to prosperity. It did not matter that the Poubah of Profit himself, Alan Greenspan, said he had been naive to expect an invisible hand to provide needed fiscal moderation.
But more was at work. The gentleman charged that I engaged in “class warfare,” you know, the kind that Marxists use. No one charged the greed merchants of Wall Street with class warfare as they offered loans they clearly knew could not be repaid. Get the loan commission and run. Hang the consequences. He refused to accept that “only 6 percent of sub-prime loans went to low income borrowers.” You see, it’s easier for the “greedies” to blame a lot of small-time home-buyers buying over their heads and then needing rescue. Better to swallow the camel of AIG and other biggies getting the other 94 percent and to deny such inconvenient facts. Why let on that we just witnessed the failure of a whole school of economics? Greed is good, remember?
My friend says he is a weekly communicant who resents “being called ‘greedy’ by someone who has no idea about what life is like outside of his ivory tower.” I’ll have to ask my priest friends there if their rectory is such. I am familiar with “ebony and ivory” configurations in some local rectories, but none so opulent as he intimates. He resorts to ad hominem attack against your humble spokesman while defending the worthies of AIG and the servile government administration that sold out to them.
It would not help much to point out that Pope John Paul II wrote Centesimus Annus to present the flaws of both economic extremes, Marxism and capitalism. Going after the messenger again, my correspondent might say his Holiness came from a Warsaw-Pact nation and could not qualify as a modern-day prophet of God’s call for global social justice. Oh well.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”