for July 28
Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

When you pray over today’s readings, it’s helpful to keep in mind the historical context of Jeremiah’s life. In the year 587 the Babylonian Empire under King Nebuchadnezzar finally overwhelmed the defenses of the City of Jerusalem and occupied the city. It was a devastating defeat for the Kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom. With the previous fall of the northern kingdom, Israel proper, the history of the Jewish people virtually came to an end. The long exile in Babylon (near present day Baghdad) followed, the darkest hour in the history of the Old Testament Jews. Jeremiah is preaching and praying in the midst of a national disaster. Keep that in mind when you pray with Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah’s world, the modern distinctions we take for granted did not exist. There was no secular government separate from religious authority and accountability. The identity of the nation was founded on the covenant with the God of Israel and the fate of the people was dependent on their fidelity to that covenant. In Jeremiah’s mind, the betrayal against God and failure to comply with the requirements of the Covenant would inevitably lead to utter destruction, so any resort to political maneuvering or foreign alliances was merely the continuation of a failed policy. Israel’s only recourse was a complete change of heart, repentance and a return to faithful submission to God. None of Jeremiah’s contemporaries saw the crisis in this light. Jeremiah was utterly alone and increasingly the object of extreme derision, branded a traitor by his own people. For his defeatist language he was charged with lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

Jeremiah’s role in the bible is to serve as the paradigm of the rejected prophet, forced to endure excruciating mental and physical persecution. Jeremiah gives emotionally charged voice to his anguish, his anger, his disillusionment, his resentments. Shockingly, many of these negative emotions are directed at God who forced this horrible fate on the prophet.

Jeremiah is the classic figure, therefore, of the person under fire on the verge of collapse. 

My eyes stream with tears. I can’t sleep. I see a battlefield strewn with corpses, fallen soldiers. There is widespread famine in the land.

Jeremiah sees the destruction as an act of God, or at least the permissive will of God, as God’s response to Israel’s infidelities. In such a crisis, Jeremiah’s complaints and cries of anguish are not always carefully reasoned, but the outbursts of a desperate man.

Have you cast us off completely? Are we so loathsome to you? Can the wounds you’ve inflicted on us ever be healed? Breaking your covenant for you is self-destructive. You are all there is left for us. No one else can help us now.

No one in the bible is more emotionally distraught than Jeremiah nor closer to the brink of despair. No one calls out to God with such unrestrained anger, more reluctant to remain obedient to a God who seems so abusive. The language, at times, can be shocking to our ears. It is a vivid and brutally honest portrait of the struggle of faith within a troubled soul. This is what faith is, at least for Jeremiah with his passionate determination to pursue his mission—foretelling the horrible defeat of his nation and the inevitable judgment of God that it represents—and the courage to face failure.  But what comes shining through all the human imperfection of Jeremiah is a heart intensely absorbed in his loyalty to God, a loyalty that sometimes goes against his deepest human instincts and transcends his own feeble understanding. 

If we reflect deeply on Jeremiah’s words and allow ourselves even for a moment to imitate his courage and honesty, we may find ourselves moved beyond control by Jeremiah’s witness. For Jeremiah’s story is ultimately the story of every believer, every person who has stood before the awesome mystery of God and bared his soul in confusion and fear and frustration and disappointment. The present circumstances of pandemic and economic collapse and all the other things that confront us would have been very familiar to Jeremiah. Faith, he would tell us, is never easy. But in the end, it leads to the greatest truth.
—Walter Modrys SJ

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.