The words of passion from Jeremiah in his love affair with God remind me of the “burning” of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to a Naked Beauty”: “As if you were on fire from within./The moon lives in the lining of your skin.” Jeremiah’s complaint is that loving God puts him at odds with the world, and causes him to suffer; he is not a willing sufferer, but he has been seduced by God. The usual translation is “duped”, but a mystical tradition within the Church that renders patah as “seduced”, and I think it is appropriate especially for this passage. Jeremiah’s love for God is all-encompassing. He is in love with a being, caught up in a passion that will not be denied. Indeed, these lines could have been taken from the lover’s complaint of a Shakespearean sonnet.
“I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure.”
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure.”
This intensity finds its resonance in today’s gospel reading from Matthew where God’s love for humanity is likewise intense and “foolish” in the person of Jesus, who realizes that he will soon suffer and die because of this passionate love for humanity. That is why he sharply rebukes Peter, whom he had praised just moments before, and suggests that seeking to avoid the suffering is an inclination from Satan. Clearly, Peter loves Jesus and wants Jesus to avoid suffering and death. Peter wants the triumphant king, not the suffering servant; but, clearly, Jesus is the Suffering Servant, and many who followed him equated him with Jeremiah for whom the Suffering Servant was likely penned (some thought Jesus as the resurrected Jeremiah).
Of course, Peter was perhaps the most passionate of all the disciples---in word and action. Personally, I think Jesus realized that what is essential for the continuation of the mission was passion, not administrative acumen (though we need not find them as opposing qualities). Peter’s passion needed to be directed away from his fanatical devotion to Jesus, and towards God’s mission of embracing humanity. Our purest expression of love for God is our love for whom God has created. Jesus makes falling in love with God less of a mystical affair, and one of flesh and blood reality. Jesus’ Great Commission (John 15:12) isn’t about loving God directly, it's about loving one’s neighbor. It is in loving one’s neighbor, then, that the love of God becomes flesh and blood. Like God, our love will be often rejected, and we will indeed pay a high price for having been “seduced” to love the God we can see in each other, because our love of Christ compels us beyond the love of family, of nation, of tribe, and seeks the love of God in all, not just among the "lovable".
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