A few late (sorry!) notes on this week’s texts. I’m still feeling pretty awful, so prayers very much appreciated.
I see a kind of progression in these passages, a movement that begins with the boy Jeremiah facing his fear of himself—“I am only a boy!”—and culminates with Jesus, as a man, escaping a mob in his hometown that still thinks of him as a child—“Is this not Joseph’s son?” It gives a kind of map of maturation, showing us what it looks like to be delivered from the self-doubt the enemy constantly uses against us.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
In this passage, Jeremiah is recalling his first encounter with God, and his exchange recalls Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush (Exod. 3-4). In that encounter, each time God speaks Moses counters with a protest, voicing a many-sided and deeply-rooted self-doubt:
“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Exod. 3.11).
“But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’” (Exod. 4.1).
“O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exod. 4.10).
“O my Lord, please send someone else” (Exod. 4.13).
Unlike Moses, Jeremiah doesn’t fight with God, doesn’t rile God’s anger. Or at least he tells us nothing about it in this retelling of the experience. He says next to nothing, in fact, about his thoughts or feelings; he simply reports what God said and did: “But the Lord said to me…” “Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth…” We know the story of Moses, however, and the stories of other prophets. So we cannot help but suspect that Jeremiah must have struggled with what God required of him.
And later we learn more of the truth. If he did not anger God, God did anger him:
O Lord, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed;
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I must cry out,
I must shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the Lord has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long (Jer. 20.7-8).
It is this reproach, not divine power, that Jeremiah feels as a fire shut up in his bones (Jer. 20.9). God is for him nothing so much as exhausting. Like Job (Job 9.14-21), Jeremiah knows he can’t fight God and win—but he does it anyway: “You will be in the right, O Lord, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you” (Jer. 12.1). Perhaps it is precisely that readiness to fight, weary as he is, that makes him the prophet he is?
Luke 4:21-30
The crowd at the synagogue in Nazareth responds well to Jesus—at first. They marvel: “Is not this Joseph's son?” But their seemingly benign question betrays a dangerous familiarity, which Jesus immediately reprimands. He knows their familiarity, although presented with praise, actually masks a deep and malignant mistrust. He knows that they will—in spite of themselves—try to grasp what they perceive to be his powers. He knows that they will try to get a handle on him so they can make some use of him. He knows that they will want him to prove himself. He knows that their only hope is to come to God as outsiders, not insiders—like the nameless widow in Sidon or Naaman the Assyrian warlord—desperate and without presumption.
They do not receive the reprimand gracefully, but are filled with rage—like idol-worshipping gentiles (see Ps 2 LXX and Acts 4.25-26). They drive him out of the town, intending to throw him from the cliff, recalling the last temptation Jesus had faced in the wilderness, led by the Spirit of God (Lk 4.9-12), and anticipating the deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac who was driven by demons into the wilderness (Lk 8.28-39). But Jesus escapes by passing through them, as their ancestors had once passed through the waters of the Exodus. And then he goes on his way—as opposed to their way, the way they wanted him to take. He is finally undeterred by their fury and their toxic familiarity because he has already faced it down through his forty-day Spirit-led clash with the devil’s lies. Those fears, we might say, have already been driven out of him.
In these two passages, read together, there is, I think, a pattern of maturation into Christ-likeness. First, we have to learn not to fear ourselves. Then, we have to learn to refuse to fear those who think they know us best. We have to outgrow self-accusation—whatever it is in us that makes us say of ourselves “I am only a ____!”. Then we have to uproot the even deeper self-doubt that makes us fear the questions others ask of us— “Is this not _____?”
Easy to say, of course…
1 Corinthians 13.1-13
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” This is how we outgrow self-accusation and uproot self-doubt: we embody and personate Christ, loving others in and with him. It is not how we are loved but how we love that frees us. As we know, it is perfect love that drives out fear (1 Jn 4.18). But what is it that makes love perfect? The life of God coming alive in us as we live our lives for the good for others (1 Jn 4.12).
Self-doubt remains so long as there is a “self” to doubt. And a “self” that can be doubted in this sense is just in that way exposed as false. The only way for me to be true to myself, for my self to be true, is for me to forget myself in being true to you. It is only in the turning away from my mirrored image, whether I’m holding the mirror up to myself (as the boy Jeremiah held it up to himself), or the mirror is being held up to me (as the man Jesus had it held up to him by his neighbors), to the light of your face (1 Cor. 13.12) that I become me. So much of what seems like darkness in my life is simply the shadow cast by my false self trying to create an image of itself for itself. Loving you, I step into the light of the one who loves unendingly—and the shadows are driven away.
In the end, then, it really is this simple, although of course not at all easy: I am myself only as God’s patience with you and kindness toward you happens in and through me. God never insists on his own way, never counts your wrongs, never holds your failures against you. Why? Because God cares more about you than he cares about himself. You are the widow in Sidon! You are Naaman the Syrian! Knowing that, and coming to delight in that, makes it so that I can be a self, my self, in the only sense that matters, the sense that matters for you, so that you can sing with the Psalmist that you have never been put to shame.
Hope you get to feeling better. Will continue to pray. Thank you for your insight with this. Love Jeremiah. It’s one of my favorite books because it tells Jeremiah’s relationship with God and God’s pleading love for his people.
Even when your sick, you’re writing and insights are powerful. Thank you for these reflections on self-doubt. Take care!