Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Jeremiah 20:7-13
O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. — Jeremiah 20:7
In our OT lesson for this Sunday, Jeremiah does not begin with a prayer. He begins with an accusation.
The Hebrew verb translated “enticed” is not a gentle word. Elsewhere in Scripture it carries the sense of seduction, of one party working a deception on another who has let his guard down. Jeremiah is not so much disappointed in God; rather, he feels overmatched by Him — captured by a calling he did not fully choose and cannot now escape. “You overpowered me,” he says. “You prevailed.” Most of us have learned to speak more carefully to God than this. We soften our complaints before we voice them. Jeremiah doesn’t. He speaks with a candor that borders on blasphemy, and the text lets it stand without correction.
Jeremiah has his reasons. His ministry has earned him almost nothing but ridicule. “I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me” [20:7b]. His warnings go unheeded. Even his close friends, he says, are watching for him to fail. This is not a prophet having a bad week. It is a man who has spent years paying the price of faithfulness, a man who has begun to wonder whether the cost was ever disclosed to him in full.
At one point he considers the obvious remedy. Why not simply stop? “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’…” [20:9a] — he gets as far as forming the sentence. He does not get further.
Then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot [20:9]
We tend to hear that verse as a description of enthusiasm — “fire in the bones” as a phrase for zeal, the kind of thing that ends up printed on a coffee mug. Jeremiah means closer to the opposite. The fire does not energize him. It exhausts him. It is not inspiration; it is compulsion. He tries the door marked silence and discovers it will not open.
I think that what is remarkable about this passage is not the accusation, and not even the fire. It’s what we see next. Without explanation — without any indication that his circumstances have changed at all — Jeremiah turns and says: “But the LORD is with me like a dread warrior” [20:11]. The man who has just accused God of deception now declares God his protector. The shift is so abrupt it nearly gives the reader whiplash. And then the passage arrives at what sounds like a resolution:
Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers [20:13].
If we stopped reading here — and indeed, the Lectionary does stop here — we might conclude that Jeremiah’s crisis has passed — that complaint has given way to confidence, doubt to settled faith. But Jeremiah does not. The very next words he speaks are among the bleakest in all of prophetic literature:
Cursed be the day on which I was born [20:14].
He curses the man who brought his father the news of his birth, wishing the man had been struck down before he could speak the words. He wishes he had died in the womb, his mother’s body becoming his grave, so that he might never have lived to see what his life would cost him. The man who has just summoned the congregation to sing is, within the same breath, wishing he had never drawn breath at all.
I think that this isn’t a contradiction the text is embarrassed by. Three movements sit side by side here, unedited and unresolved: an accusation bitter enough to border on blasphemy, a trust that arrives with no evidence to support it, and a curse dark enough to wish away his own existence. Holy Scripture does not flatten any of them to make room for the others. It does not let the praise cancel the curse, or the curse undo the praise. All three come from the same mouth, very likely within the same hour, and the text preserves all three as equally his.
Which Jeremiah is the real one? The accusing one, the trusting one, the despairing one? Scripture's answer appears to be “Yes!” All of them, and at once. Faithfulness, on this account, is not a feeling onto which a person manages to hold. It is not even consistency of feeling at all. Jeremiah moves through anger, exhaustion, trust, and despair within the space of a few verses, and what holds those movements together is not some stable emotional center he has found. It is simply this: he never stops talking to God. He accuses God, and keeps speaking. He praises God, and keeps speaking. He curses the day of his own birth — to God, in God's hearing — and even that does not end the conversation.
There are seasons when prayer sounds like a hymn, and seasons when it sounds much more like an argument, or a curse. Jeremiah suggests that God is not driven off by either. The relationship does not require us to arrive at it in good order. It only requires that we keep showing up to it, honestly, with whatever we actually have to say that day — gratitude, accusation, or the wish that we had never been born at all.
Perhaps that is the deepest claim this difficult text makes: that faith is sometimes nothing more, and nothing less, than refusing to leave the conversation.
Be First to Comment