Matins Sermon: Jeremiah
08 February 2009 at 10:00 am
This is the second of two Matins sermons I am giving this month on the subject of that extraordinary prophet Jeremiah. He prophesied after the Northern Kingdom of Israel had been overrun by the Assyrians, but his native land of Judah, the Southern Kingdom including the town of Jerusalem was still free when he was born. He feared would be overrun by the new rising regional power of the Babylonians, as, indeed, it was in his lifetime. In the first lesson this morning we heard of the threats that Jeremiah faced because of his prophesying doom both for the Temple and for Jerusalem. It seems here he was concerned about the failure to carry through the religious reforms Jehoiakim’s father King Josiah had initiated, which centred worship in Jerusalem, but he warned the people of Judah that the agent of God’s judgement for that failure would be the Babylonians.
And as we heard in the first lesson it was a real threat to his life that he faced from, we are told, the priests, the prophets and the people, and he was only saved from that threat by the intervention of the princes of Judah. But that was not the only time he faced serious threats to his life. Later, and more because of his warnings about the Babylonians, he was imprisoned by the princes who had helped saved him at an earlier stage and he was only brought out of prison by the intervention of the new King of Judah, Zedekiah. And shortly after that, as Jerusalem was being besieged by the Babylonians and he was recommending some sort of negotiations with the Babylonian military leaders, those who opposed that policy had him lowered into the mire at the bottom of a well where he would have been left to die but for the intervention of agents of King Zedekiah.
Zedekiah evidently had ambiguous feelings about Jeremiah, on the one hand he recognised him as a genuine prophet and a man to be listened to, but on the other hand he did not want to take his advice when Jeremiah suggested surrender to the Babylonians. Jeremiah warned Zedekiah of the consequences, and his warning proved right, for eventually the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem and Zedekiah and his party as they tried to escape. They slew Zedekiah’s sons in front of him before blinding the King and then taking him and the rest of the nobles into captivity in Babylon.
Just to complete the story of Jeremiah’s life as far as we know it, the Babylonians treated him well and allowed him to live in his native land with the Governor of Judah they appointed, Gedeliah, but when Gedeliah was assassinated the new ruler forced Jeremiah to accompany him to Egypt, where some traditions say that he died in old age, possibly even murdered by those of his own nation who had always objected to his prophecies, although other traditions speak of him eventually going to Babylon with the conquering army. We simply cannot be sure about the end of his life.
But what makes his writing so powerful for us now are the almost introspective musings of this man expressed at various points in the Book of Jeremiah as he struggled with his prophetic vocation. He faced the dilemma that I suppose many others have faced of sensing disaster and destruction coming to the land he loved, bewailing the failure of the leadership to respond in what he believed was the right way, and fearing the consequences not for himself but for the people. And alongside that there are the emotions that one might expect in such circumstances, anger, including anger against God, cursing those who were responsible, including sometimes even God himself, and lamenting the terrible things that were about to befall his people; those are some of the themes we can read in those more introspective passages as well as in his prophecies as a whole.
Take the opening of chapter 12: ‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I complain to thee; yet I would plead my cause before thee. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all those who are treacherous thrive?’ Jeremiah was neither the first nor the last person to wonder such things, but what he did do was address those feelings to God. If that is what he felt and thought, then it was to God he must express his innermost thoughts. Jeremiah gives us the confidence to be honest with God.
And when he was attacked for what he was saying he could again say to God, in chapter 15, ‘Woe is me, my mother, that you bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me.’ Again he was neither the first nor the last person to find himself deeply unpopular for saying what he saw as the truth, but say it he still would. In his day as in our own there were always people who wanted to think everything would be fine, and were simply not willing to face the more difficult problems. Whether they are political problems or religious difficulties there will always be the complacent, those who just want to say that all is or would be well. And of course sometimes it is, but then sometimes it is not, and again Jeremiah is a source of comfort to those who feel they have to speak an unpopular truth, and a worry to those of whom he said ‘They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace where there is no peace.’
Perhaps the most famous passage of all those inward musings is in chapter 20, when what he expected and said would happen did not happen exactly as he had foretold, and so he rails against God:
O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived;
thou art stronger than I, and thou has prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout ‘Violence and destruction!
For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’ there
is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.’
Of course in his case he was eventually vindicated, in that the Babylonians did sack Jerusalem and take the nobles into captivity as he had prophesied. But then he also looked beyond that to a better future.
It was Jeremiah who wrote of the new covenant he would make with his people; he puts into the mouth of God the words ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’
Jeremiah was a prophet of doom, because he saw doom coming, and he was right, but he was more than that; he also had a deep conviction of the possibility of forgiveness, of the possibility of healing, and of the possibility of a real change in the human heart. And that, I suggest, can be an encouragement for us all.