You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed — Jeremiah 20:7.
While reflecting on this passage from Jeremiah, I looked up the meaning of the word “duped.” According to Dictionary.com, it means “to be tricked or deceived.” That doesn’t sound very good, does it? None of us likes to be tricked, and the idea that God “tricks” us is certainly an unpleasant one. Jeremiah was a reluctant prophet. Like many before and after him, when God called, he tried to politely say “No, thank you.” God persisted and Jeremiah relented. His job was to preach of the captivity of Jerusalem. He was a prophet of doom and gloom and no one wanted to hear about it. As a result, he was rejected by everyone and ultimately branded a traitor. As a result, here in Chapter 20 we find him lamenting. His laments actually lead him to curse the very day he was born (Jer. 20:14). Obviously, this was not the life he would have chosen.
Are there times in your own life when you feel God has duped you? Perhaps God has asked you to do something you just don’t want to do. It need not be a big thing. It could be befriending the person everyone else has rejected. It could be teaching religious education or volunteering in your child’s school. Maybe God is asking you to change careers or be more generous or reach out to that neighbor who you have never really gotten along with. Perhaps, like Jeremiah, you have tried to politely decline the invitation. Maybe you have even looked around to see if there was someone else more suitable to the task. “Surely, God, you aren’t talking to me? You must be looking for Amy three houses down!” Never-the-less, God persisted and you ended up doing what He wanted.
It would be wonderful if we did God’s will and life turned out great for us. Sometimes it does. Responding to a call can bring greater personal fulfillment, an important new friendship, or open doors that we never even knew existed. Sometimes, however, it can leave us feeling like Jeremiah. We may become outcasts for standing up for what we know is right. The person to whom we extended our hand in friendship may reject us. The career change may leave us underpaid and unappreciated. Like the prophet, we may feel that God tricked us, and that even worse, we allowed it to happen. We may be kicking ourselves for following the call, for not being strong enough to resist the power of God. We may even come to rue our very existence.
Yet, what is the alternative? If we reject God’s call, where does that leave us? We do have choices. God will respect our free wills, although He definitely will keep pushing us in the ways we are meant to go. We might look at the road not taken and feel that it is better, easier, smoother. For us, however, that was not the road we were meant to take. It may be smoother, but it is not the road that leads to our salvation. It is not the road that allows us to live as God intended us to live. Yes, it may seem that God has triumphed and in the process caused us to fail, but only God knows the final outcome which may be greater than we could ever imagine.
September 6th, 2008 at 5:54 am
I wish more Catholic Priests would reflect more genuinely upon the words of the Prophet Jeremiah by stating a little background of what is going on in the GREAT Old-Testament Scripture. As a matter of fact, among the many Catholic Masses I attended last weekend, not a single one spoke even for a second about Jeremiah or this reading.
Jeremiah was a teenager with a direct connection to God. He was not graced by anything we would call “people skills,” and in fact as most male teenagers would, he had an angry, immature spirit within him.
He was something like James Dean famous for being a “rebel without a cause,” but in the case of Jeremiah, who lived and died several centuries before Christ, Jeremiah had one, and he was “fragged” by his friend in battle when the Jews were facing invasion from the south, and in that battle he was not killed by the Gentile invaders, but by his own.
What he did was write an entire story that contained with complete record and context two sides of the story. What is unique about Jeremiah is that he correctly captured both sides of a conversation he had with God. First we hear the selfish Jeremiah speaking from his heart, and then we hear God’s response.
The particular reading from last week is this:
You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me.
Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.
I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.
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When we hear this, we think of violence and outrage as a message that must be God’s will since one of God’s prophets spoke these words, but what you hear in this particular reading is simply the word of an angry young teenager, without the other side of the conversation which gives the whole Book of Jeremiah its true meaning. Please go check out http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/#jeremiah - any teenager can learn a lot from this, as Jeremiah was indeed before his death as a teenager someone who could really identify with anger like his at the world, and God’s response to it.