When Love Costs Us Something

Suffering is an inevitable part of life. Yet, like the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps one of the worst kinds of suffering is betrayal by those who were once our friends. Friendship is one of the most important human relationships, and every form of love requires a kind of intimacy. To love another person is to expose something of ourselves to them. But that intimacy also makes us vulnerable. Those we love can wound us in ways that strangers never could.

Jeremiah knows this pain. He has not merely been abandoned by his friends; they actively seek to harm him. And yet, even in this betrayal, he knows that God is with him. The prophetic vocation was not easy for Jeremiah. Again and again, doing what God asked came at great personal cost. Still, Jeremiah entrusts his cause to the Lord. He sings praise because he knows that God rescues the poor from the power of the wicked, even if that rescue does not always come according to our timeline.

This suffering is not accidental to the human condition. Through one man, sin, death, and suffering entered the world. Through Adam’s transgression, the relationship between humanity and God was damaged. But the damage did not stop there. Our relationships with one another and with the created world were also wounded. We see this in ordinary human life. We hurt one another. We prefer our own good to the good of others. We fail to love as we ought. This failure of love causes great pain, just as Jeremiah experienced.

But God rescues us, just as Jeremiah trusted Him to do. The gift of grace won by Christ surpasses the transgression of Adam. Just as death came to the many through one man, grace now overflows to the many through Jesus Christ. This did not happen according to a human timeline, nor according to our convenience. But in God’s own time, the chasm between humanity and God was closed.

In this gift, we have great hope. But this hope also comes with a great responsibility: to proclaim the truth of God’s salvation. Christ tells us to speak in the light what we have heard in the darkness, and to proclaim from the housetops what has been whispered to us. The love of God is so great that the Son entered into our humanity, joined Himself to our suffering, and redeemed us from sin.

We must acknowledge Christ before others. If we do, Christ Himself will acknowledge us before the Father. But if we deny Christ, we cut ourselves off from the very source of life. This is not always easy. Jeremiah’s life makes that clear. Faithfulness can carry a real earthly cost. Yet we pray that, in His great love, the Lord will answer us and help us live according to His will, even when obedience requires suffering.

Each person is of immense value, even when human society fails to recognize it. The value of the human person is not measured by status, wealth, usefulness, ability, or success. Our dignity comes from what we are: children of God, made in His image.

This is why Christ tells us not to fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Bodily suffering is real, and it should not be dismissed. But it is not the greatest danger. The greater danger is sin, because sin wounds the soul and separates us from God. Sin may not always appear harmful at first, but it always damages us. It bends us away from the love for which we were made. In this sense, sin “kills” the soul not by annihilating it, but by cutting it off from the life of God.

God does not desire our harm. He created us in His image as personal beings, endowed with intellect and will. This freedom is not something God merely declines to override, as though He were restrained by some power outside Himself. Rather, it belongs to what a personal creature is. To remove intellect and will would not produce a free person who is simply more obedient. It would destroy the very conditions of personhood. A personal being without intellect and will is not a difficult mystery; it is a contradiction.

Therefore, God’s preservation of our freedom is not an external limitation on His power. It follows from the kind of creature He has made us to be. God can heal, elevate, and move the will by grace, but He does not abolish it. Grace does not make us less personal. It restores us so that we can become more fully what we were created to be: creatures capable of knowing, loving, and freely giving ourselves to God and neighbor.

But freedom is real, and so is the danger of abusing it. When we misuse our freedom, we bring suffering upon ourselves and others. This lies at the heart of so many broken relationships: we choose disordered self-love over self-gift, or others make that same choice against us.

We are called to proclaim Christ to all. That proclamation may bring suffering. It may cost us comfort, reputation, relationships, or even bodily safety. But Christ reminds us that the salvation of the soul matters more than the preservation of earthly security. We may try to preserve the body and lose the soul. Or, by God’s grace, we may offer ourselves in faithfulness and receive true life.

God offers us grace. But we must choose whom we will serve: God, or ourselves.