The Prophet Jeremiah was born about 650 years before the birth of the Lord Jesus, and Jeremiah was by birth a priest of the Old Covenant from the tribe of Levi. But in the year 626 BC, the Lord called Jeremiah to serve as a prophet and sent him to stand as a pillar of iron and a wall of brass against a nation lost in sin, his own nation, the People of Israel.
The Lord sent Jeremiah to admonish his people against their infidelities to the covenant and to warn them that if they did not repent, their grave transgressions of the law and love of God would cost them everything. So in Jeremiah’s preaching, the contrast between the way of righteousness and the way of lawlessness is stark.
Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is a like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, but stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth.”
But by way of contrast: "Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream; it fears not the heat when it comes; its leaves stay green; in the year of the drought it shows no distress but still bears fruit.”
Jeremiah spent forty years proclaiming the Word of God and calling the people back to the covenant the Lord made with their fathers, but he failed. The corruption of the nation was so deep and widespread that even a powerful prophet sent by God could not turn the hearts and minds of the people to the truth of the revealed Word of God, and the result was calamity.
Jeremiah lived to see Jerusalem conquered and the Temple destroyed, but even after the Captivity began, the Prophet was allowed to remain in the ruins by the victorious Babylonians. Jeremiah was finally taken to Egypt as a prisoner of his own people, and one ancient tradition says that in Egypt he was stoned to death by his exiled countrymen because they were tired of his preaching against their sins.
And yet more than 2,500 years later, we are still reading Jeremiah’s words and learning from his wisdom. “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.” While “blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose hope is the Lord.”
This is a lesson which our culture does not want to learn any more than Israel did. The corrosive acids of relativism, skepticism, and cynicism make it difficult in the extreme for anyone to hear the claim that there is an objective and eternal moral law which we did not invent and which we cannot change.
But each person and eventually every nation will either live in keeping with the law and love of God or reject them in favor of individual appetites and personal preferences. And because of man’s Fall from God’s grace, people in every time and place struggle to hear and heed the Word of God, something that is especially difficult in our day because of our fundamentally irreligious culture.
Modernity and post-modernity hold that each person is autonomous, meaning a law unto himself, and the false definition of liberty derived from this defective view of the human person holds that no one can tell me what a good life is or that any of my choices are objectively wrong. And to the secular mind this misconstrual of human nature makes the refusal to shape my life by the wisdom of Holy Scripture into a touchstone of personal maturity.
But what does the revealed Word of God say? The psalmist sings: “Blessed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked, nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent, but delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on his law day and night.”
And by contrast: “Not so the wicked, not so; they are like chaff which the wind drives away. For the Lord watches over the way of the just, but the way of the wicked vanishes.” Friends, walking according to the revealed Word of God is the only path of authentic human freedom and flourishing, and while it is never easy to stand apart from the herd, that is the only way of those who follow the Lord Jesus. That is the Way of the Cross.
But to follow that way requires of us an understanding of the paradox at the heart of all discipleship. To lose one’s life for the sake of Christ and his Gospel is to find it. And explaining one dimension of that paradox is what we see the Lord Jesus doing in the Gospel today in the Sermon on the Plain. Saint Matthew describes a similar Sermon on the Mount, but Saint Luke places this discourse on a wide stretch of level ground where a giant crowd gathered to hear Jesus preach and hope for his healing touch.
As with Jeremiah and the psalmist, the Lord Jesus compares and contrasts two ways of life, and following the higher and better way demands sacrifice. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” Such as Jeremiah.
And then by way of contrast Jesus says: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
Here the Lord Jesus is not teaching that being prosperous is wicked or that being poor is in itself virtuous. Human dignity requires that we meet the needs of our bodies with decent food, clothing, and shelter, just as we must feed our souls with goodness, truth, and beauty. And so the Lord Jesus is not suggesting that living in deprivation makes us holy or that having a comfortable life makes us iniquitous.
But Christ is saying that living for the sake of pleasure always ends in misery, that living without concern for the needs of others is empty, and that living without divine grace is meaningless. Moreover, no life which is lived in contradiction to the revealed Word of God, however satisfying it may be in various ways, can finally be a life worthy of the children of God, while a life lived in keeping with the Word of God, no matter what sacrifices it may entail, is finally the only life worth living.
And more than that, the Lord Jesus teaches that being wealthy and healthy, beautiful and popular are not signs of a divine blessing, just as being poor and sick, plain and lonely are not signs of a divine curse. Christ teaches, rather, that the path of blessedness, which always includes earthly suffering, is found only in fidelity to the revealed Word of God, while the path of wretchedness, which can include worldly benefits, is found in rebellion against the Word of God.
Friends, true wisdom is found in knowing the difference between these two paths and in having the courage to choose the Way of the Cross, especially when righteousness is costly because it is rejected and despised by the multitudes who follow false prophets.
On the day of our Baptism, we were called by name, just as was the Prophet Jeremiah, to be witnesses with our words and with our lives to the liberating truth of the Word of God, and being faithful to that call will cost us everything we have and may result, as it did for Jeremiah, in our being dropped down a well or stoned by our own countrymen, even if only metaphorically through scorn and cancellation.
But fidelity to the revealed Word of God is the only path to righteousness, the only path to beatitude, and the only path to a life filled with the blessings of knowing, loving, and serving the Word made flesh, the one who is the wisdom and the power of God: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 16 February 2025, the 6th Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman