There is a text in Luke’s Gospel that I meant to cover back in Holy Week but things slipped by. It is a rather extraordinary thing that Jesus said on his way to the cross. He said it to women who had gathered to lament him:
Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’ At that time people will say to the mountains, ‘Fall upon us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ for if these things are done when the wood is green what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28-31)
The text is really quite astonishing for, as awful as the crucifixion was, as mightily sinful as it was for us to kill the Lord, as terrible as this moment is, Jesus says something worse is coming, something more awful. What was Jesus talking about and is it a prophecy for our times?
With any Biblical text it seem opportune to ask three questions: What did it mean then?, what does it mean now?, and What does it mean for me? Too often today an almost exclusive emphasis is placed on the historical meaning of a text. While this is interesting it is also important to apply the text to our own times and to apply it personally. This is usually the goal of good preaching. So let’s look at this text with all three perspectives in mind.
1. What did it mean then?– Jesus had often spoken of a great destruction soon to come upon Jerusalem for her lack of belief. He did this primarily in the Mount Olivet Discourse which is recorded in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt 24:1-51; Mk 13:1-37; Lk 21:5-36). Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies, nation would rise against nation, the temple would be destroyed and there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again (Mat 24:21). While many confuse this discourse as referring to the end of the world, Jesus is clear at the beginning of the discourse that he is referring to the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem that in fact took place in 70 AD (cf Matt 24:2-4; Mark 13:2-5; Luk 21:5-7). In many ways the Jewish War with the Romans was one of the bloodiest and most awful wars ever fought. Josephus indicates that 1.2 million Jews lost their lives in this devastating war. Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple was thrown down, never to be rebuilt.
Thus, historically Jesus seems to be saying to the women, “Women of Jerusalem though you weep for me in my suffering be aware that something far worse will come upon you and your children. It will be so awful that people will actually call those who died blessed and those who never existed lucky. It will be so awful that people will long for death. He then refers to green wood and dry wood, an expression that basically means, “If I who am innocent among you meet this fate of crucifixion what will be in store for the guilty?” Hence what it meant then was that Jesus summoned the women to prayer, a deep and mournful prayer, that would call people to conversion. Otherwise difficult days were ahead.
2. What does it mean now?– Jesus spoke not only to his times but to ages yet unborn and to our own age. And perhaps as no other age, his words fit our times like a glove. For indeed these are times where many say, Blessed are the wombs that have born no children. Blessed are the wombs that bear fewer children. Blessed are those who contracept, blessed are the surgically sterile. In other words, Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, the breast that never nursed. Throughout the Western world birth rates have plummeted and are dangerously low in many countries. Some Western Christian nations and societies are contracepting and aborting themselves toward a point of no return. Years of fear mongering about overpopulation, extolling of contraception and preferring the single life to marriage and family has led to a dramatic shift in the attitudes of many westerners toward children who are now seen as a burden more than a blessing. Sterility and barrenness were considered a terrible curse in biblical times and until very recently. But, in what Pope John Paul II termed a “culture of death” many in the West have come to say “Blessed are the barren.” And although nations like Germany, France and Italy are begging their citizens to have more children and providing tax incentives it seems that most Western Christians can’t be bothered with things like marriage and family.
And not only this but many in the radical environmentalist movements see humankind as a great scourge on this planet and would prefer that “the mountains fall on us and the hills cover us.” There are bumper stickers that say, “Earth First” and History Channel shows that fantasize about “Life after Humans” (actually a rather creative show).
Hence, in looking forward to our times, perhaps Jesus’ words to the women would be: “Women of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but weep for your descendants. For the days are coming when people will actually say blessed are the barren. The days are actually coming when people will prefer not to have children or to have as few as possible. The days are actually coming when expectant children will be aborted and the capacity to do this will be called a right, where women with difficult situations will be taken to abortionists and those who bring them will think they are doing something good. The days are actually coming when depression, self-loathing, lack of hope and misplaced priorities will so consume your descendants that they will prefer non-existence to existence, where death will become a kind of “therapy” through abortion, euthanasia, contraception, and stem cell research. Yes, dear women, prayerful weeping may be salutary to push off these grievous times for as long as possible. But the days are coming when these things shall come to pass. For if you think things are bad now when the wood is green, what shall happen when the wood becomes dry?”
You may think my word picture a bit extreme. But what I am trying to capture is the stunning quality of Jesus’ words. He warns these women of very difficult days ahead.
3. What does it mean for me?– Now do you really think I am going to do your work for you? It remains for you and me to answer this question for our very selves. What do you weep about? Is it what really matters or is it merely about worldly losses that are going to be lost anyway? What kind of a world are we bequeathing to our children? Do we love life? Is new life a sign of hope for us or a burden? Do we speak prophetically about the culture of death? Do we encourage marriage and praise child bearing? Do we help young parents in some of the difficulties of raising children? But the Lord surely has more personal questions for you an me as well. Pray the text slowly and ponder what the Lord might be saying to you.
A Star Trek Episode, “The Mark of Gideon” depicts overpopulation anxieties of the mid 1960s. Captain Kirk is abducted to an over-populated planet. Look out the window in the opening moments of this video and see a true Malthusian nightmare. I remember being taught to fear over population in school and we were told that we were going to have no more room soon! The people in this video seek to reintroduce disease into their culture to cut down the population. Kirk exhorts them to use contraceptives and sterilization instead. The segment goes on to depict them as pathetic in their love for life. Kirks gets angry when they demonstrate respect for life from conception to natural death. But Kirk speaks for his age, and as is usually the case, the modern therapy he articulates is death.
As usual, your posts have got me thinking again. I actually have a really hard time grieving. When I was new to the ER I was taught to suck it up and deal with it when I saw patients die. Forget being allowed to grieve, even if it was someone I knew. As a result, when I’ve had family or friends die recently, I find myself unable to cry or feel emotional pain, and then I end up being the comforter of family and friends. I’ve come to realize that I have never properly grieved for certain events in my life, and I’ve gotten frustrated because in my mind I should be healed, or “over it” by now. Every now and then it hits me what I’ve seen and been through, but for the most part I go day by day feeling indifferent or numb about it. If someone told me it was ok to cry and feel pain, I wouldn’t know how to. At least not in front of other people.
What do I feel the most emotional pain for? Some of it is very personal, but I do grieve for out culture of death. I grieve for our medical world and the extreme shortage of professionals that truly love their jobs. I am glad you posted this.
One thing that I have learned in my journey is that numbness is not a lack of feeling. Numbness is a very real feeling. It’s strange too, I have often wept more over losses years later than I ever did in the moment. SOmething protective I think kicks in, and only later are feelings set loose.
Interesting post. I think there is a great irony in the application of Jesus’ words to our own time. When Jesus uttered the words, “blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed,” he was envisioning the brutal Jewish war climaxing in the Temple’s destruction and, therefore, the way in which Judaism was practiced since the time of the kingdom. In a real sense, Judaism as Jesus knew it came to an end in 70 AD. It was a wretched time to be alive (for a Jew) and people could very well be excused for blessing the womb that never bore. Apply those words to our time and the context changes from one of apocalyptic war and privation to one of hitherto unimagined material prosperity and security.
As to population, I am pleased that the hyperbolic fears of overpopulation are beginning to subside, or, if not subside, as least be recognized as hyperbolic fears. However, I am in no hurry to embrace hyperbolic fears of underpopulation. Yes, the overall aging of the population (in the west anyway) will create stress on our society over the next fifty to a hundred years. No, I don’t think the French, Germans, or Italians are in danger of extinction. If they were, I’m sure the WWF would intervene to protect them and start breeding them in captivity. (Joking). Population may rise, or fall, and I don’t think either occurrence is necessarily apocalyptic.
fair enough. THough my post is not apocalyptic in intent. Just trying raise the stubborn notion in our culture that death and non existence in the first place are often proposed as solution. Death is a strange therapy gernerally speaking.
Crazylikeknoxes: Notwithstanding your sanguine hopes for Old Europe, demographers note that Italy’s fertility rate is blow 1.4, which puts it in a demographic death spiral. You are also at odds with the Muslim immigrants who wear t-shirts: “2030–that’s when we take over”. Charles Martel, call your office.
I remember reading an article about a Kenyan clinic that was overstocked with millions of dollars of birth control pills/devices but had an epidemic number of people dying from Malaria because they did not have medication (much cheaper than the birth control) to treat Malaria. The healthcare workers there talked about the fact that population control in certain parts of the world had more support and funding than caring for the population that already existed. Hmmm? Wonder how that could be?
Then again, take note of the percentage of PP’s clinics that are located in poor and minority communities. I guess it is important to make certain people have convenient access to birth control and abortion. Aparently, we are rather selective about our popluation control. Margaret Sanger would be proud.
Yes indeed.
When I was growing up, my mother told me to get a career I loved, and not to marry. She and my dad were good Catholics, but they had an unhappy marriage and my mother said though she did her duty by the children she never wanted to be a mother. She says she had married because she was ill-educated , had poor job prospects, and marriage was the only career that looked viable — she said it was the only way she could have a home and security. Once Dad died she bloomed as a contented and serene widow.
So I took Mom’s advice & didn’t marry, and had a satisfying career as a business-college teacher. At 42 quite unexpectedly I married an older Catholic widower, and we have been very happy. (He has 4 grown sons)
People don’t believe me when I say I have no regrets for not having children ( I’m nearly 70). I know its better not to be a mother than to be an unhappy, depressed one like mine, who did the best she could.
I am truly sorry for barren women I have known, who have been desperate– almost unhinged– wanting children, so that the lack of them depresses them, defines their lives, and sometimes stresses their marriages (Scary! ). — However I have never been able to identify with them.
There is a saying, “The teacher is a parent of the mind” and I have mentored countless students into good jobs so they can support their families. I suppose I have sublimated my maternal instincts that way. So Luke 23: 28-31 works for me.
This is very good. I esp. love the illustration. Can you share where it is from?
I clipped it from here: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://extraordinarymomsnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/jesus-and-the-women.jpg&imgrefurl=http://extraordinarymomsnetwork.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/weekend-ponderings-how-blessed-are-you/jesus-and-the-women/&usg=__F9TvYmPxUTCEARlW5bZdua8cAEo=&h=320&w=320&sz=34&hl=en&start=5&sig2=hxNgGKe3Ia05F5bA5R_l-A&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=jKAqLfo7vV3g6M:&tbnh=118&tbnw=118&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djesus%2Bwomen%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26tbo%3D1%26rlz%3D1T4GGLL_enUS348US348%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=6n7PS5KFKMT_lgfkhYiiCw
They also credit a site known as outofthesilentplanet.files.wordpress.com
C.S. Lewis once said something to the effect that we are all going to die, and (if experience is anything to go by) a great number of us are going to die horribly. Everyone in Jerusalem, then, must, with a little reflection, have had this sense of things, too.
So, there are presumably special things being pointed to, here.
Could there be a special focus on the interrelation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer circumstances’? Jesus knew, as far as anyone can, as willing Victim, what He was facing, and in the fulness of His sinless, faithful humanity, how. But, we might compare the very specific personal word of John 21:19, they may well be taken where they do not want to go, into all sorts of ‘outer’ circumstantial horrors, as differently powerless victims than He has freely made Himself.
I think there is pity for what they may/will face, in what He says, but not only a call but also an encouragement to faith, to faithful perseverence, and also an implicit, “rejoice, O Daughters of Jerusalem”, “I have overcome the world”, and “lo, I am with you always.”
Sean: My hopes for old Europe are not particularly sanguine. Truth be told, the fate of a post-Christian Europe does not interest me as much as the fate of a Christian Europe. But take heart, the birth rate in Muslim cultures is the fastest falling birthrate of any in the world. By 2050, the Muslim birth rate is projected to be the same as that of the United States. (See http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH23Aa01.html) I don’t expect that will be much comfort to the ghost of Martel, however.
Jesus lived relatively free during His life but witnessed the encroachment of governmental bodies dictating and controlling the lives and destiny of the Jews more and more which in and of itself was the eventual cause of His death. It is not unlike what people my age are witnessing going on in the world and at this very moment in our society and government. It’s deja vu all over again. Beam me up Scotty.
Instead of ringing its institutional hands and speaking solemnly and ineffectually against legislative provisions that permit and fund abortion with public funds, why doesn’t the Church-—i.e., its responsible teaching authorities, the bishops—take public issue with the politicians who by word and deed actively and publicly support the abortion culture. All pro-abortion public figures, from the late Paul Newman and Barack Obama on down, should be subject to these admonitions. In particular, Catholic politicians and other Catholic public figures should be told publicly that their promotion of abortion is a grave sin that bars them from the Eucharist. This is Canon law, after all.
If the bishops cannot even draw the line and say that murdering unborn children puts you out of communion with the Mystical Body of Christ, what moral authority can they possibly claim for the Church’s other teachings? What sort of Good News could they possibly be proclaiming? How open to the gift of sacrament grace could a person be who promotes the mass murder of innocents?
One of the few American bishops to live up to his responsibilities, Archbishop Raymond Burke, has explained (http://tinyurl.com/canon915) that Canon Law 915 requires that flagrant public sinners not be admitted to Communion, and that failure to discharge one’s responsibilities under Canon 915 is itself a grave sin. It is not a revival of Donatism to note that the great majority of the American Catholic hierarchy at least *appear* to be be committing a grave public sin. That appearance–even if it were only an appearance–is a scandal that weakens them in dealing with other scandals of lax pastoral care.
[Second try. Sorry] It might be of interest that in A.D. 70 the budding Christian community of Jerusalem took heed of Jesus’ words and literally took to the hills, thus escaping the siege of Jerusalem, in which Jewish mothers are reported to have been reduced to eating their own children. Blessed the barren womb, indeed! However, conventions of exegesis notwithstanding, applying to our own times what is so obviously a prediction of events within the lifetimes of Jesus’ contemporaries can easily become an exercise in fantasy. Still, we might ask ourselves if any of our expressions of pity and piety, however worthy, are misplaced and do not take into account the looming holocaust.
The matter of abortion has already been brought up. I believe that with regard to the “culture of death”, including abortion, research on embryos, euthanasia, and anti-human campaigns for population control, the American Catholic hierarchy has been derelict in appreciating how quickly the wood is drying out.
Instead of wringing its institutional hands and speaking solemnly and ineffectually against legislative provisions that permit and fund abortion with public funds, why doesn’t the Church-—i.e., its responsible teaching authorities, the bishops—take public issue with the politicians who by word and deed actively and publicly support the abortion culture. All pro-abortion public figures, from the late Paul Newman and Barack Obama on down, should be subject to these admonitions. In particular, Catholic politicians and other Catholic public figures should be told publicly that their promotion of abortion is a grave sin that bars them from the Eucharist. This is Canon law, after all, and God’s law and the law of the Church are the bishops’ particular responsibility. Let them teach the faithful, and let the faithful then make the civil law.
But if the bishops cannot even draw the line and say that murdering unborn children puts you out of communion with the Mystical Body of Christ, what moral authority can they possibly claim for the Church’s other teachings? What sort of Good News could they possibly be proclaiming? How open to the gift of sacramental grace could a person be who promotes the mass murder of innocents?
One of the few American bishops to live up to his responsibilities, Archbishop Raymond Burke, has explained (http://tinyurl.com/canon915) that Canon Law 915 requires that flagrant public sinners not be admitted to Communion, and that failure to discharge one’s responsibilities under Canon 915 is itself a grave sin. It is not a revival of Donatism to note that the great majority of the American Catholic hierarchy at least *appear* to be be committing a grave public sin. That appearance–even if it were only an appearance–is a scandal that weakens them in dealing with other scandals of lax pastoral care.
Thanks Msgr. Pope. This really is true. “The Culture of Death” is so prevelant. Supposedly the prolife movement is coming back though. I heard the youth are really rallying around. So maybe we will see the youth turn it around.
“preferring the single life to marriage and family has led to a dramatic shift in the attitudes of many westerners toward children who are now seen as a burden more than a blessing.”
Please do not assume that all us middle age spinsters PREFER it this way. Some of us simply believed marriage was truly a SACRAMENT and as such just picking someone and making him fit (ala the ugly stepsisters cramming their feet into the glass slipper) was NOT the way to approach the sacrament. Some of us tried to find the right marriage partner and did not, or thought we had found him, only to have our hearts broken. Some of us refused to participate in the endless parade of sex-in-the-city shack-ups, sleepovers, and hook-ups that dating had become and found ourselves quickly left out and left behind. Some of us were never asked to be a wife and some of us were asked, but we knew in our hearts he was the wrong person. And many of wanted children but wanted them as a product of our love and commitment to one special man who in turn, would WANT to be a loving husband and father not merely a sperm donor and weekend visitor.
Do NOT ASSUME when you meet a single person of a mature age that you know what heartaches she/he has been through or that SHE/HE is a gleeful participant in the culture of death.