God’s sarcasm, our credulity, and Christ’s Church

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 08, 2025

I am not going to search deliberately for as many examples as possible, but prophetic utterances can sometimes have a sarcastic side. A prime example of Divine sarcasm was delivered by the prophet Micah in the eighth century before Christ when he said to the people of Jerusalem:

If a man should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,” he would be the preacher for this people! [Mic 2:11]

And if you think the Israelites were bad, consider what so many of our contemporaries are itching to hear today. Well might we wish to rise to a stage of dissolution characterized by wine and strong drink!

Nor was Micah the greatest one ever to sharpen his tongue. Remember Our Lord’s words about the Pharisees and the lawyers who rejected both John the Baptist and Himself:

To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.” For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, “He has a demon.” The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, “Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” [Lk 7:31-34]

Our need for help

Apparently those who will believe nothing said by God are prone to believe just about anything said by men. Otherwise cultures could not shift so rapidly from one falsehood to another—from sound family life, for example, to contraception, to divorce, to every kind of sexual license and abuse, to transgenderism, to transhumanism and, when every natural myth of instant happiness inevitably proves hollow, to suicidal despair.

The same pattern emerges in our social and economic standards. Those who cannot take the trouble to adhere to any irksome natural law can justify themselves by taking whatever the currently fashionable position may be on things like same-sex marriage and gender change. What matters most, apparently, is to be judged right and good by all those who have no objective standards for rightness and goodness—what matters, apparently, is to hear more about wine and strong drink.

Based on our collective track records, one can only wonder how to turn away from the dominant blandishments in favor of sincerely seeking out what is true. Fortunately, we have both human and Divine indicators for those who wish to escape despair before they die. Sadly, though, when one is a proud member of an affluent dominant culture, the effects of ultimate hopelessness may be masked for a very long time.

Take my own case. I am “already” seventy-seven (in the blink of an eye, apparently), and if I were not interiorly aware of certain deficiencies in virtue, I would not yet be convinced that I had to take the time I have left seriously. I have not been successful in every human endeavor I have undertaken, but neither have I been forced by God through extreme suffering to recognize that I am insufficient unto myself. I am depressingly “upper-class modern” in my tendency to rely on my own energy and intelligence. I have not been compelled—other than through an interior recognition of my own weaknesses—to turn to God lest I despair of myself.

I did nothing to deserve either the good upbringing I received or the many opportunities I had to both recognize God and grow in His service. Most of what I have accomplished has come, to speak frankly, because I have a personality well-suited to our times: If “everybody” is going one way, I just naturally want to go the other. Even good Christians need to be careful not to say “up” to me, unless they really want me to go down! I thank God that I have become aware of this; but the tendency still gives me all kinds of excuses not to recognize my own faults. (Is it really so hard to identify with the Pharisee who thanked God he was not like all the others (Lk 18:11)?)

Learning to distrust oneself

Sometimes we need to learn to distrust ourselves. (In this it helps to have a religious superior, or a wife!) A priest once told me that I had a streak of Protestant individualism in my personality that was potentially dangerous. I sometimes wonder if this has failed to prove deadly (or so I presume) only because the Church herself had so many people who advised going in the wrong direction when I was slithering toward adulthood in the late 1960s and very early 1970s. (I went off to college in 1966, married in 1972, and finished graduate school in 1973.) As the years passed, however, I gradually began to see something more than just how wrong everybody else is, recognizing at least some of my own sins (along with so much of my own sheer and unmitigated stupidity).

It is always a very great blessing to recognize in oneself a need for God’s mercy. Nonetheless, it is natural (which is not the highest value) for me to go right when others are going left. I have first-hand acquaintance with the common human conviction that “I am (and must always be) right.” But instead of defining “right” as whatever the dominant culture says it is, I tend to define it as whatever the dominant culture says it isn’t.

Both attitudes are actually understandable. But in the last analysis, what I don’t understand is how such unwarranted certainty can be held so absolutely by so many people without ever seriously examining their presuppositions. As the “perfect” Catholic I had to work at distinguishing myself from the Magisterium. It isn’t enough to take our own rectitude for granted. We need a source of truth that goes beyond ourselves.

Now, I can easily understand why so many truth-seekers put the Catholic Church last on their list of institutions to explore. A Church that is instinctively feared (and lied about) by Satan, but still littered with a great many human sins which detract from her claims, is never quite as credible as it might be, despite all the motives of credibility she can offer to those who finally decide to investigate.

I am speaking of such things as her remarkable Founder and her magisterial consistency over thousands of years, the sublimity of her teaching and her stupendous works of charity, the glory of her saints and the courage of her martyrs through her entire history, the beauty of her art and architecture, and even the human unlikeliness that any of her merits could have been preserved for even a single human lifetime.

Sometimes, even among members of the Catholic Church, we might well say: “If a man should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, ‘I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,’ he would be the preacher for this people!” But if we take the Church seriously, we can easily distinguish between her sacraments and her Divinely-protected Magisterium, on the one hand, and the sins of her members, on the other. It takes a humble mother to recognize her own children as sinners. So while it comes to me naturally not to trust most other people, I also understand how foolish it would be to trust myself with neither any objective standard nor any hope of correction.

Christ the Head provides for all this through His Body the Church. This recognition can protect us from false prophets and all their many followers. But the greater miracle is that, with a little cooperation, it can also protect us from ourselves.