Jeremiah's strong words introduce us today to a most crucial theme in the struggle to understand Christian living in a world with a completely different mind. Jeremiah says, "Yahweh's word has been the cause of insult and derision all day long". Jeremiah is practically accusing God of abuse, of having first seduced him and then made him a laughing-stock for those who mocked him. It's an accusation of betrayed trust.
It happens even to us whenever we regret choices we make, especially when we face consequences we believe we do not deserve. The question that always surfaces here is: Why does God treat His own so badly? We can easily accept consequences for evil done; but it's beyond us to suffer for being honest, for being people of integrity, for having loved genuinely, for having tried to hinder the triumph of evil.
But then the angry Jeremiah makes also a mostly significant confession when he says, "Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not bear it." God is always stronger than death, than evil, than all that makes us resist Him. To use the imagery of St John of the Cross, there is a path to walk with "no light except the one that burns in your heart".
The Gospel remains on the same theme, with Peter who represents all in us that resists God. Peter here makes an effort to restrain Jesus from going to Jerusalem. And Jesus takes him to task for completely missing the point because the way he was thinking was not God's way but man's.
According to God's ways, there is always connection between the Messiahship of Jesus and suffering. That connection endures to this day in whoever tries to do good, to stand up to be counted without compromise. This is the Gospel principle that "anyone who wants to save his life will lose it".
In today's reading from Romans, Paul translates this in the so-called apostolic exhortation: Do not conform yourselves to this world. In short, be anti-conformists.
The Gospel self-abnegation is often interpreted negatively in our culture, sounding rather morbid and making literally no sense at all when what we hear is just 'be yourself'. In each and every one of us there is always the false and the true self. In many things we do, we may be misled in feeding the false self. As Thomas Merton says, "The mother of all lies is the lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves." But at the end of the day, living in denial multiplies our suffering.
Our decisions in faith are meant to break the mechanisms in which, unawares, we often find ourselves entrapped. That's how the world functions, be it in the media, or the economy, or relationships. But in this same world, we are called to be prophets of another form of existence.
We have to make choices, otherwise choices are made for us and then we just have to follow suit and face the music.
The Crucifixion was the consequence of choices Jesus made. But it was not the last word in his life. Like Jeremiah, we need the prophetic spirit to see the unseen, to unveil the networks of violence and oppression, even in what we are made to believe to be normal and legal.
If we still opt to call ourselves Christians today, we need to ask whether we really want to follow Jesus Christ and love as he did. We are free to choose differently. We can choose the kind of routine, self-absorbed, half-hearted, anaesthetic Christianity. It's easier.
It also costs less. But it makes of us people with no ideals that are worth dying for.
Which in turn makes life just a simulation.