Continuous pain, Incurable woundedness

In today’s first reading, Jer 15: 10, 16-21, Jeremiah laments about having been born, sees himself as a person “of strife and contention.”  He complains that he neither borrows or lends yet “all curse me.”  He cries out in his pain, saying to the Lord: “Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?”  How many people, I thought, are in that state of mind, tortured by emotional and psychological pain, traumatized by the violence of war, sitting in refugee camps, and so wounded by past traumas of sexual, physical, verbal and emotional abuse that their psyches remain, it seems, incurably wounded. 

The Lord responded to Jeremiah, asking him to repent of any wrongdoing and bring Him “the precious without the vile.”  Each and every person is the precious one in God’s sight. Before God, none of  us is despicable, wicked or loathsome.  In Christ Jesus we have been made clean, purified, healed and made whole.  Jesus Himself took our vile with Him when He entered Gethsemane. His agony was our agony,   as Jesus, the Son of God, lives in the Eternal Now.   Not only His agony in the Garden but also His crucifixion on the cross and his resurrection are our sufferings, our crucifixions and our resurrections, as, in Baptism, we died and rose with Christ. Before willingly going into His final hours,  Jesus prayed to His Father, and ours, that we would all be made one in Him as He and the Father are one. His prayer would not have fallen on deaf ears. You and I, if not now, later will know this oneness with the Lord and with one another. Vile will not separate us from the Lord.  On the cross,  Jesus set us  free us from that which defiles us, saying to the Father: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” when they commit evil or go astray. Jeremiah repented of any wrongdoing he might have done. 

May you and I repent of all that defiles our thinking or choosing or interacting with others and believe in the resurrection, accepting the grace of being set free.