You have seduced me, Yahweh, and I let myself be seduced; you have seized me and overpowered me. I have become a daily laughingstock; everyone mocks me. For each time I speak, it is to cry out: “Violence!” and to shout: “Plunder!”…
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
JEREMIAH 20:7-9
You have seduced me, Yahweh, and I let myself be seduced; you have seized me and overpowered me.
I have become a daily laughingstock; everyone mocks me. For each time I speak, it is to cry out: “Violence!” and to shout: “Plunder!” The word of Yahweh has been for me a reproach and a derision all day long. I said: “I will not mention him, nor will I speak any more in his name.”
But there was in my heart something like a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I labored to contain it, but I could not.
This is one of the most violent and significant passages from the book of Jeremiah (although it may have been inserted here by an editor). The verb “seduce” does not refer to an irresistible attraction but rather to a deception. It is used in the case where a man seduces a virgin.
Jeremiah is “handled” by God, feels wronged, feels that his life has been trampled upon, that he has become a subject of mockery for everyone, and has resisted being an instrument of God… but God has been stronger, and within himself the prophet feels the fire of the Word, of the Mission, which leads him to “ruin his life” for the Mission.
But, in addition to this, there is an inescapable component: “I let myself be seduced.” Therein lies the essence of religious and Christian life: letting oneself be seduced by God, like the person who lets themselves be seduced, who lets themselves be possessed, because love is an irresistible attraction.
How little mystical we are! But Rahner already said: “The church of the 21st century will be mystical or it will not be.” And it seems to me that the winds of the new evangelization do not blow in that direction.
ROMANS 12:1-2
I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God: what is good, pleasing, and perfect.
The same ideas are emphasized, in a simple way, under the image of the “body,” which in Paul always means life itself (when it is not the “body of death,” that is, the opposition to the “spirit”). The renewal of the mind, the well-known “metanoia,” almost synonymous with conversion, prevents us from conforming to the “present world.”
Thus, the text also reinforces the opposition between “saving and losing one’s life.”
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.