Wednesday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 27, 2022

Jeremiah 15,10; 16-21

Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth! a man of strife and contention to all the land! I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me. When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart, Because I bore your name, O Lord, God of hosts. I did not sit celebrating in the circle of merrymakers; Under the weight of your hand I sat alone because you filled me with indignation. Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide! Thus the Lord answered me: If you repent, so that I restore you, in my presence you shall stand; If you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you, and you shall not turn to them; And I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail, For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you, says the Lord. I will free you from the hand of the wicked, and rescue you from the grasp of the violent.

“Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth!”  This is a cry of despair and grief matched in the Old Testament only by that of the suffering Job: “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said: A man child is conceived” (Job 3, 3).  The very sound of the Hebrew words elicits pathos: ohh-lee.  Not even the piteous cry of Psalm 22, 1: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” compares to it, for the Psalmist does not curse his existence but seeks an answer for his grievous tribulation.  With these words, the Prophet Jeremiah breaks out in horror at the realization of his situation.  He is trapped: when he found the words of God, he “devoured” them, yet his doing so has caused his continuous wound and the incurable wound, that is, in his heart. He next cries out to Almighty God: “You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide!”  His words bring to mind Deuteronomy 4, 24: “The Lord your God is a raging fire”, which Hebrews 12, 29 adapts as, “Our God is a consuming fire.”  That is, he destroys all that might rival him in our hearts, even things that are good, until all the heart has left is him.  He will be adored and loved for himself alone, even apart from the good he has granted us.

“If you repent, so that I restore you, in my presence you shall stand.”  Almighty God says to Jeremiah, If you repent of regretting the gift of life which I have given you as well as the gift of my words, I will forgive you and you will stand in my presence now and in the world to come.  “And I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass.”  The people, realizing the danger they have incurred because of their sins, will seek Jeremiah to pray for them, but because they do not intend on repenting from their idolatry and riotous behavior, they will find in him not an intercessor but a wall.  The wall will not be one of stone that can be broken down, but one of brass, and one which they have, in fact, created for themselves.  The sinners will see their reflection in this brass and know the depths of their guilt.  Even so, they will not repent.

The Gospel Reading for today, Matthew 13, 44-46, tells of the joy which comes to those who find the Kingdom of God.  They have searched for God’s way and his truth and find it, and for them it is worth more than all their possessions.  The joy they find in it merely precedes and signifies in a small way the ecstasy they will experience in the beatific vision.  The sinners in the reading from Jeremiah, some of whom tried to kill him, could have this joy if they could only stop and give up seeking their own will, which was not bringing them happiness, and seek the Lord’s will instead.  But so many times pride comes between the sinner and salvation.  We make our own brass walls that keep us from going to God, but if we knock at the wall in humility, God will hear us and make an opening in that wall for us to come to him.