by Sr. Mary Garascia
You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped, says Jeremiah, in our first reading this Sunday. Jeremiah had resisted God’s call as a prophet, saying he was too young. When he eventually did surrender himself to God, instead of being held in honor as a prophet, he was treated with hostility by the king and the Jewish people. So he protests vigorously to the Lord about being duped.
What a great reading for us all. Life does not turn out as we imagined. Marriage, parenting, religious life, the occupations we choose — we undertake them hopefully and then experience the crosses they entail, crosses Jesus speaks about in the Gospel. The disciples, especially Peter, did not want to hear it, and neither do we. And so in life we must decide, we must rededicate, we must re-choose. We choose to lose our life in order to find it, as Jesus says.
When we pass through that stage painfully, we come to understand ourselves and the purpose of our lives. Our souls mature and become able to handle reverses and tragedy and still keep loving and forgiving. So maybe being duped is not so bad after all!