The Fire You Cannot Hold In

Last Sunday, Peter got it right and was told the answer came from heaven. This Sunday he gets it wrong, in public, and Jesus calls him Satan. Nothing changed about Peter between those two moments except the subject. Ask him who Jesus is, and grace speaks through him. Tell him what it will cost, and something older speaks instead. That is the seam running through both of today’s readings, and it runs through you too. We can say true things about God with real conviction right up until the moment those true things start asking for our skin. Jeremiah found this out the hard way. He accepted a call he thought he understood, discovered it meant being laughed at every day of his life, tried to quit, and could not. And then he told God so, out loud, in words the Church still prays.

The Readings

First Reading: Jeremiah 20:7-9

O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; every one mocks me.

For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.

If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

Gospel: Matthew 16:21-27

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Prophet Who Filed A Complaint Against God

Jeremiah 20 is the last and fiercest of what scholars call his “confessions,” passages where the prophet talks back to God with a bluntness that would get most of us thrown out of a parish council meeting. The Navarre commentators date this one to roughly 605 or 604 BC, when King Jehoiakim was hounding him, and note how much of it reads like Job 3.^[1] He has preached for years, nothing he predicted has arrived on schedule, and the people have concluded he is a fraud.

The Lectionary also starts us mid-scene. Just before verse 7, Pashhur, the chief officer of the temple, has had Jeremiah beaten and locked in the stocks at the upper Benjamin Gate (Jeremiah 20:1-2). Public stocks, in the temple precincts. He is released the next morning, and the first thing out of his mouth is this.

“O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived.” The Hebrew verb is strong, and translators have wrestled with it forever. Some render it “duped.” Some render it “seduced.” It is the word you would use for talking a person into something they would not have chosen with their eyes open.

Which raises the obvious problem, and the Fathers went straight at it. Can God deceive? Origen says he is at a loss for how to accommodate the word, then reaches for the surgeon. A physician who tells a patient the whole truth about the knife may lose the patient entirely, so he hides the blade under the sponge and the bitter drug under honey, wanting to heal rather than mislead.^[2] And then Origen says the thing that turns the whole passage around: the prophet, once he saw why he had been drawn in this way, prayed, “Deceive me, if this is beneficial.”^[3] The deceit of the serpent drove Adam out of the garden. The deceit Jeremiah is complaining about drove him deeper into grace.

Jerome takes a more historical line. Jeremiah heard his commission in chapter 1: a prophet to the nations, set over kingdoms to uproot and overthrow and build and plant (Jeremiah 1:5, 10). He accepted it, thinking the demolition was aimed at the nations around Judah, then found himself preaching destruction to his own captive Jerusalem and suffering imprisonment for it. Origen adds the detail about the cup: God tells Jeremiah to make all the nations drink the cup of wrath, and only afterward does he hear, “cause Jerusalem to drink first” (Jeremiah 25:15-18).^[4] The commission was real. Jeremiah’s picture of the commission was not.

That is the most honest thing in the reading. God does not deceive. But every one of us signs up for a vocation with a picture in our head, and the picture is always smaller than the thing.

The Burning Fire Shut Up In My Bones

Verse 9 is where the complaint turns into something else. Jeremiah decides to quit. “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name.” And he cannot do it.

Jerome puts the resolution in the prophet’s own voice and then names the failure: “I am overcome with shame and embarrassment at making this foolish resolution, as what feels like a burning fire is ablaze in my heart and enclosed in my bones.”^[5] Then Jerome does something a preacher should notice. He connects it to Paul, “woe to me if I fail to preach” (1 Corinthians 9:16), and to Athens, where Paul saw a city full of idols and could not keep quiet (Acts 17:16). Theodoret of Cyrus made the same link centuries earlier.^[6] Ambrose goes further and reads the fire as the Holy Spirit outright, tying it to the fire the Lord Jesus came to cast on the earth (Luke 12:49).^[7]

So the reading is about what happens when God actually gets inside somebody. Jeremiah wanted out and found he had been colonized. The word he tried to swallow burned worse going down than it did coming out. And John of the Cross, meditating on this same confession, drew the conclusion the rest of us have to live with: it is very difficult to understand the words and deeds of God fully without falling often into error. The prophets knew that better than anyone, because they were given words whose fulfillment they never got to watch.^[8]

The Word The Crowd Guessed

Now, the Gospel, and there is a detail from last Sunday that makes this Sunday land. When Jesus asked who people said he was, the answers came back: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets (Matthew 16:14). Matthew is the only evangelist who puts Jeremiah on that list, and he puts him there because Jeremiah runs all through his Gospel as a figure of Jesus.^[9] The crowd was wrong about the answer and closer to the truth than they knew. The Messiah standing in front of them was about to become the prophet mocked all day long, rejected by the temple establishment, and handed over.

“From that time Jesus began to show his disciples.” Matthew used that formula once before, at 4:17, to open the Galilean ministry. Here it opens the next act: Galilee is finished, and the road runs south to Jerusalem.^[10] Aquinas asks why Jesus waited until now, and answers that if he had foretold the passion before their faith was firm, they might well have abandoned him. He also notices the verb. Matthew says Jesus began to show them, not to tell them. Things told are made visible; things shown are understood. He told the Jews. He showed the disciples.^[11]

Why Jerusalem? Aquinas gives reasons worth carrying into a homily. The temple was there, and the sacrifices of the old law were figures of the one sacrifice on the altar of the cross, so he willed that where the figure stood, the truth should stand open. The prophets suffered there, so their deaths would be shown to be signs of his. And Jerusalem means vision of peace, and this passion was peace-making (Colossians 1:20). The list of his tormentors is deliberate too. Elders, chief priests, scribes: age, dignity, and knowledge, the three things that ordinarily hold a man back from sin. None of them held. “Those who seem better are found to be worse.”^[12]

Get Behind Me, Satan

Peter will have none of it. He takes Jesus aside, which Aquinas reads charitably as an attempt not to embarrass him in front of the others, and says, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.”^[13] Understand what has just happened to this man. Minutes ago he confessed the divinity, was called blessed, was named the rock, and was handed the keys. And now Jesus turns and gives him the name of the devil.

Jerome says Peter spoke out of pious affection, ignorantly. Chrysostom offers the reading I find most useful: the Lord wanted to show what a man can do by himself and what he can do by the grace of God. By grace, Peter recognized Christ’s divinity. When God withdrew that grace for a moment, his humanity and weakness appeared, and the Lord sometimes wills perfect men to fall so that they may know their own humanity. Jesus gives the reason himself. “You are not on the side of God, but of men.” At verse 16, Peter understood according to the divinity; here he understands what belongs to man. Peter fled from bodily death. The Spirit of God did not.^[14]

And the word Jesus uses is skandalon, a stumbling stone, the thing you trip over in the road. Matthew wants you to hear it against the rock of verse 18. Same man, two stones. When Peter speaks what the Father revealed, he is the foundation that holds. When he speaks from weak human nature apart from divine help, he is the rock other people fall over.^[15]

Deny Himself, And Take Up His Cross

Then Jesus turns the passion prediction into a job description. Chrysostom catches the shift in address: when he said “Peter, go behind me,” he spoke to Peter alone; when he said “if any man would come after me,” he wanted all men to come to him. Aquinas lingers on the word would, or wants to. The one drawn voluntarily is drawn more than the one dragged.^[16] Nobody gets conscripted into this.

Take up his cross. We have heard the phrase so long that it has gone soft in our hands. It should not have. The Romans perfected crucifixion and then considered it too obscene to mention in polite conversation, and Jesus picked exactly that image for the ordinary Christian life.^[17] Aquinas is just as concrete: let him be prepared to die a most bitter and shameful death, and to suffer for your own crimes is shameful but to suffer for God is not (1 Peter 4:15-16).^[18]

Following Gregory, Aquinas also gives the spiritual reading, and this is the one most of us will actually live. Self-denial comes in three forms: denying the state of sin you were in (Romans 6:11), moving from a state that is merely not sinful toward perfection (Philippians 3:12), and denying your own particular attachments (Galatians 2:19). The cross itself, he notes, takes its name from torment, and a man is spiritually crucified whose mind is tormented out of compassion for his neighbor (Romans 12:15). Then a warning that is easy to miss because it sounds pious: “Many have compassion, but do not follow God.” You can feel deeply for the suffering, be genuinely moved, and still be carrying that compassion around inside a life you have not surrendered.^[19]

Verse 25 turns on a single word, psyche, which means both the breath in your lungs and the soul that outlives it, and Jesus is playing on both meanings at once. Read it of bodily life: the man who will not risk his skin loses the very thing he was protecting. Read it of the soul: the man who abandons his carnal desires for Christ’s sake finds his life. Either reading gets you to the same door. And when someone objects that he can always earn the soul back later, the Lord closes that exit. “Or what shall a man give in return for his life?” Nothing. There is no currency for it.^[20]

This lands on verse 27: the Son of Man coming in his Father’s glory to repay every man for what he has done. Aquinas reads it as the answer to the question you were about to ask. Why should I follow and take up the cross? Because judgment belongs to the Son of Man (John 5:27). Do not grieve that he suffers, for he will come in glory. Do not grieve that he is rejected by the elders, for he will come in the glory of his Father.^[21] The standard is conduct, and in Matthew’s Gospel that reaches our words, our thoughts, our actions, our willingness to forgive, and our works of mercy (Matthew 25:31-46).^[22]

Daily Application

Start with the thing you would rather not admit. Somewhere in your life, you made a commitment with a picture in your head, and the real thing turned out to be larger and harder than the picture. A marriage. A vocation. A sick parent. A child who is not who you assumed he would be. You did not sign up for the version you got.

Jeremiah did not either. And the Church, in her wisdom, hands you his complaint as Scripture on a Sunday morning. An accusation, read aloud from the ambo. “You duped me, and I let myself be duped.” God put that in the canon. He is not embarrassed by it, and you do not need to be embarrassed by your version of it. Tell him. Out loud. Use his own prophet’s words if your own fail you.

But notice where his honesty takes him, because this is the whole point. He complains, he resolves to quit, and then he discovers he cannot. The fire is already in the bones. Something put in him holds him to his vocation, and it will not go out. Ambrose says that fire is the Holy Spirit. If you have been baptized and confirmed, it is already lit in you, and most of the time you have no idea it is there because nothing has asked enough of you to make it flare. You are most likely to feel it when you most want out.

So when Jesus says, “Deny yourself and take up your cross,” hear it in that light. Aquinas is careful about the word Jesus chose: the one drawn voluntarily is drawn more than the one dragged. Gritted teeth will get you through a week. Wanting it will get you through a life, and the wanting is itself a grace you can ask for. If you cannot yet want the cross you have been handed, make that your prayer this week. Ask for the fire, and for the desire to carry what he has actually given you rather than the lighter thing you had imagined.

Today’s saint shows what that looks like when it goes the distance. Jeanne Jugan was born up this coast at Cancale in 1792, in the middle of the French Revolution, and lost her father to the sea when she was three. She worked as a kitchen maid, then as a hospital nurse, and in 1839 she and two other women brought a blind, paralyzed old woman into their home. That was the beginning. By 1853, the association she founded numbered 500 and had reached England. The Little Sisters of the Poor.

And then this. A chaplain named Le Pailleur blocked her reelection as superior in 1843, and nine years later reassigned her to duties inside the congregation and refused to recognize her as its founder. She spent the last decades of her life in the motherhouse while young sisters entered, took the habit, and had no idea that the quiet old woman among them had started it all. The Holy See removed him in 1890, eleven years after she died. She never saw her name restored.^[23]

Set that next to Jeremiah. He was mocked all day and could not stop preaching. She was erased from her own work and did not stop serving. And set them both next to the verse: whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Jeanne Jugan lost hers twice, first by giving it away to the elderly poor and then by having the credit taken. She was canonized in 2009, and the order she founded is now allowed to call her the Founder; it works in 30 countries.

So here is the week. Find the one place where you have been quietly saving your life, protecting some corner of it from a demand you already know is there. It is usually small and specific: the conversation you will not have, the hour you will not give, the apology that would cost you the last of your standing in someone’s eyes. Peter’s instinct is human, and Jesus does not condemn him for having it. He tells him where it comes from and refuses to let it stand.

Then do the thing, small enough that you will actually make it before Friday. Jeanne Jugan’s whole life turned on one evening when she carried an old woman up the stairs to her own bed and slept somewhere else.

And when it costs more than you expected, which it will, take the discrepancy as evidence you heard God exactly right and simply could not have borne the full picture on the day you said yes. Origen was on to something with the knife under the sponge. Let him hide what he needs to hide. He is healing you.

Go find the fire he already put in your bones, and stop trying to hold it in.

---

Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 20:7-18. ↩
2. Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah 20.3.2-3, in Jeremiah, Lamentations, ed. Dean O. Wenthe, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament XII (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 154. ↩
3. Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah 20.3.4-5, in Jeremiah, Lamentations, ACCS OT XII, 155. ↩
4. Jerome, Six Books on Jeremiah 4.22.2-4, in Jeremiah, Lamentations, ACCS OT XII, 155-56; Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah 20.2.1-2, in the same volume, 155. ↩
5. Jerome, Six Books on Jeremiah 4.23.2-5, in Jeremiah, Lamentations, ACCS OT XII, 156. ↩
6. Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretatio in Jeremiam 20, 9, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 20:7-18. ↩
7. Ambrose, Duties of the Clergy 3.28.102, in Jeremiah, Lamentations, ACCS OT XII, 157. ↩
8. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel 2, 20, 6, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Jeremiah 20:7-18. ↩
9. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 247. ↩
10. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 211. ↩
11. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1397. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §§1398, 1399. ↩
13. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1402. ↩
14. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §§1403, 1405, 1406. ↩
15. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 211-12; Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, 249. ↩
16. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1408. ↩
17. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 212, citing Cicero, Pro Rabirio Perduellionis 5.16. ↩
18. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1409. ↩
19. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1410. ↩
20. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §§1411, 1414. ↩
21. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 3, §1415. ↩
22. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 213. ↩
23. “Saint Jeanne Jugan,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-jeanne-jugan/. ↩

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005)
• Dean O. Wenthe, ed., Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament XII (InterVarsity, 2009)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)