22d Sunday of Ordinary Time
Aug. 30, 1981
Jer 20: 7-9
Matt 16: 21-27
Don Bosco Tech, Paterson, N.J.
“O
Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jer 20: 7).
Have
you ever felt that God has asked more of you than you bargained for when you
became a disciple?
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Jeremiah by Hamaxides - Own work, CC
BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57998657
|
That’s
Jeremiah’s situation. Jeremiah didn’t
want to be a prophet, didn’t want to deliver God’s strong message to Judah. The message was this: Unless you reform your lives, you shall be
destroyed by Babylon. “Whenever I speak, I cry out, ‘Violence and
destruction’” (20:8).
But
God called Jeremiah as a young man and promised to support him. “Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to
deliver you” (1:8), the Lord told him.
Reluctantly, Jeremiah obeyed—and got as results mockery, imprisonment,
house detention, plots against his life.
So
he did what you or I would have done. He
shut up. “I will not mention him, or
speak any more in his name” (20:9).
No
good. “There is in my heart, as it were,
a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I
cannot” (20:9). The prophetic word burns
within the marrow of my bones. It’s torment to be silent; it’s torment to
speak.
So
Jeremiah protests, loudly and strongly.
“O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than
I, and you have prevailed” (20:7). The
Hebrew vocabulary has a sexual tone of seduction to it; Jeremiah feels that God
has done something awful to him, has psychologically and emotionally raped him.
Jeremiah’s
personal experience is, in one sense, unique, like every individual’s. In another sense, it’s typical. When we give ourselves to Christ, we do it
with our whole person. Sooner or later,
our physical, emotional, and spiritual resources are tested: tested by the death of a 16-year-old boy,
perhaps[1];
by religious obedience; by a difficult marriage; by long unemployment; by
abandonment; by misunderstanding. We’ve
all experienced one or another of these.
Jeremiah
didn’t know it, but he was walking with Christ.
Jesus last week praised Simon Peter and gave him the keys of the kingdom
of heaven. This week, 3 verses later,
Jesus is rebuking Peter because Peter doesn’t want Jesus to suffer and
die. It’s too much for Peter to handle—as
it often seems to be for us.
But
Jesus goes on: “If anyone would come
after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Whoever loses his life for my sake will find
it” (Matt 16:24, 25). Jeremiah had to go
thru this, and eventually Peter and the rest of the apostles too. Every disciple of Jesus must carry the cross
with him. We admit it, yet how angry we
feel when it happens, for it wasn’t the shape, or size, or weight we were
expecting. Then we want to scream out,
“God you tricked me. This isn’t what I
bargained for.”
Most
of us have heard the story about the man who complained to the Lord about his
cross. So the Lord took him into the
storeroom where all the crosses of mankind were kept and told him to find one
he liked. He tried one and found it to
awkward to carry; and another, which was so light he felt like a sissy carrying
it; and so on for quite some time.
Finally, he came to one that seemed to fit just right. He said to Jesus, “Can I take this one?” And, you know of course, Jesus told him,
“That’s the one you came in here with.”
Some
folks fail the test of the cross. They
throw it away, and with it the One who is on it. We always need to pray for God’s strength,
for we are weak like Jeremiah and Peter.
We always need to be compassionate and supportive of one another, for we
don’t know what prophetic word burns within someone else, what cross he
carries.
God
bless you.
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