Dare to be a Jeremiah? You’ll become an object of vicious, merciless attack. Try saying that something considered evil or immoral ten years ago is still so, you’ll be scurrilously denounced by the enforcers of modern orthodoxy in the media and academia. The tyranny with which the new police of contemporary ethos operates often takes on the contours of a gang in which it is not permissible to be a non-conformist. A false consensus with all trappings of pluralism and liberation unleashes a centrifugal motion that doesn’t just seek to expunge the non-consenting but confines them to a social doghouse. If they fail to dig up stuff on you, they make something up which they hang on your head, and watch you spend the rest of your life defending your tarnished name. Our modern society looks every way like a replay of “Jeremiah Inside the Trenches.”
You might have felt like Jeremiah those times you saw or heard truth, goodness and right conduct painted as lies, treachery and outrage while evil is glamorized with temerity. As society continues to slide into nihilism, the sad fate meted to truth and goodness makes it tougher for our generation to distinguish right from wrong, truth from falsehood, and the benign from the odious. The level of confusion to which society has been thrown forces the few who still believe in anything with the resemblance of truth to either keep silent or join the train and water down their convictions.
You may or may not be a fan of any particular public official. However, if there is any modicum of objectivity in your brain, you’ll recognize that our political media have ceased to be disseminators of information and turned into blinded partisans and devotees of their brand of ideology. If they agree with a particular official, they’ll institute a cause for political and moral canonization of the official, their family, their wardrobe and their missteps. Should they disagree with an official, they turn into witch-haunters with a barrage of negative information about the official, their family, and even their virtues. Like a script out of this line from Jeremiah: “Denounce! Let us denounce him!” you can feel the thirst for vengeance. They go to bed plotting lies and evil and wake up with the hope that “Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail.” And this goes across political divides—right, left or center. The script for religious, moral and political intrigue was not written today; it was written in Eden and made part and parcel of fallen humanity. Jeremiah was its victim. You’ll experience it as a parent, a teacher or student from the agents of hate.
When Jesus steps into this fray, He brings a message of reassurance and vindication for the cause of goodness and right. He says to His apostles and those who believe in Him: “Do not be afraid.” I read from a certain scripture scholar that the expression, “Do not be afraid” is found 365 times in the Bible. I have not attempted to verify that. But it means that we’re encouraged by the Lord to everyday rid fear from our lives. St. John Paul II had the expression “Do not be afraid” as his life and missionary principle; believing that if we resign our lives to God, we need not be afraid of those who’ll attack us. It was with that conviction that he energized Poland to reject and overthrow the evil of Communism. The same conviction led Blessed Stanley Rother back to Guatemala to bring Christ to his parishioners of Santiago Atitlan and speak truth to the powers that be. Jesus tells us that the real spiritual danger we face is not losing our mortal life. That we will die is the fated lot of all. The real danger is that the evil one may cause one to reject and deny goodness, virtue and truth, and steal one’s eternal inheritance, turning it to eternal death. St. Paul adds that death is an irreversible power but the gracious gift of the one man, Jesus Christ is greater than death. Only when we lose our mortal body in death would we realize how fleeting physical existence, which the world glamorizes is.
Fr. Chukwudi Jo Okonkwo