A Reflection for Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Find today’s reading here.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John's.
The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,
these works that I perform testify on my behalf
that the Father has sent me. (John 5: 35-36)
I went to Northern Iraq-Kurdistan in 2018 a few months after the Islamic State had been driven from the region by U.S. and Iraqi coalition forces. I visited with members of the remnant Christian community and Yazidi survivors of a near genocide as they assessed the damage and decided how to carry on—if they could carry on. Iraq’s Christian population had already been in a steep decline that accelerated because of the ISIS rampage. How could this small community hope to survive, I wondered, reduced to just a fraction of their numbers?
When I was in Erbil, in the Christian suburb of Ankawa, I learned about an even smaller and even more threatened community that had fled into Kurdistan to escape ISIS, the Mandaeans. Today there are only a few thousand of them left in the world. They are the contemporary followers of John the Baptist.
To them, the teaching of John the Baptist represented a suitable endpoint of divine revelation. Somehow over time and through upheaval and conflict, they have carried on, confirmed in their belief, following the fire that John brought into the world 2,000 years ago.
In the first reading today, Moses intervenes to save his “stiff-necked” people from a wrathful God, furious because of the backsliding of the Israelites. In the Gospel, Jesus reminds his listeners that John had preceded him, “a burning and shining lamp,” lighting the way to the path of righteousness and calling them to atonement.
Moses and John the Baptist and so many other prophets, preparing the way of the Lord. But most people who listened did not hear or, hearing, did not follow. Why would they treat Jesus, the deliverer of the fullness of divine mercy and wisdom, any differently?
Have we contemporary believers treated Jesus any differently? Or do we hear what we want to hear, pick out the Scripture that demands the least of us and carry on as if Moses and John and Jesus had not come to save us? Woe to this generation, who have been the recipients of centuries of appeals and entreaties but who remain unmoved by them, too prideful, indifferent, a “stiff-necked” people indeed.
