Jeremiah 7: 27-8:3

 ²⁷ So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call to them, but they will not answer you. ²⁸ You shall say to them: This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the LORD their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips.

 ²⁹ Cut off your hair and throw it away; raise a lamentation on the bare heights,
for the LORD has rejected and forsaken the generation that provoked his wrath.

                ³⁰ For the people of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the LORD; they have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name, defiling it. ³¹ And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire– which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind. ³² Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the LORD, when it will no more be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of Slaughter: for they will bury in Topheth until there is no more room.³³ The corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the animals of the earth; and no one will frighten them away. ³⁴ And I will bring to an end the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of the bride and bridegroom in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for the land shall become a waste.

 8:1 At that time, says the LORD, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its officials, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs; ² and they shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and served, which they have followed, and which they have inquired of and worshiped; and they shall not be gathered or buried; they shall be like dung on the surface of the ground. ³ Death shall be preferred to life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family in all the places where I have driven them, says the LORD of hosts.

It has been a little while since I’ve posted anything on Jeremiah. This has been sitting as a draft for a couple months and it was going to be posted the day the tornadoes went through Moore, Shawnee and Newcastle Oklahoma and I didn’t want any association with the title and what happened there. (Also as an excuse my son who had some of my resources on my e-reader with him while he was in Oklahoma for the first part of the summer) but recently I’ve had a couple events that have encouraged me to get back to Jeremiah, so here you go.

We return to the language of horror and disgust precisely to attempt to get past the walls of resistance that the people have put up around them. Are the people practicing child sacrifice, we will never know, but to the Jewish mind this is the most revolting of the practices of the world around them. A time when death is so prevalent that there is no longer the ability to separate the dead from the living because there are no places left to bury the dead. Death is so prevalent that it invades into the everyday experience of the people and they cannot help but be defiled by the presence of death in their midst. The dead are left in the open for the crows and wild animals to consume, and the wild animals have the run of the land—no one is there to stop them. This is the image of a slaughter. There is no more joy, no more happiness, no more celebration, it is the ending of the world as they know it.

Even kings and priests and officials are not exempt from the sacrilege. Their honored bones are laid upon the ground, prophets have no honor, and they are valued as crap. What remains is the image of the boneyard of Ezekiel 37 where no life seems possible. The world where death and defilement has been kept at bay is suddenly turned upside down and death is everywhere around.

Jeremiah 7: 16-26

¹⁶ As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you. ¹⁷ Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? ¹⁸ The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. ¹⁹ Is it I whom they provoke? says the LORD. Is it not themselves, to their own hurt? ²⁰ Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: My anger and my wrath shall be poured out on this place, on human beings and animals, on the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched.

 ²¹ Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh. ²² For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. ²³ But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.” ²⁴ Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward. ²⁵ From the day that your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; ²⁶ yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks. They did worse than their ancestors did.

Now the audience shifts from Jeremiah speaking to those who listen at the temple gate to God speaking to Jeremiah. Jeremiah seems to have become the one who God can speak to when everyone else has stopped listening and now God tells Jeremiah not to intercede for the people anymore. God is tired of listening, God is at the point of giving up. God is tired of being patient, of waiting for the people to return. On the one hand we see a religious practice within the families that are putting a lot of effort into worshiping other gods as a household, on the other hand the cultic practice of the temple is lifted up as something that replaced obedience. Sacrifices and religious practice have replaced the central command to hear and listen.

The prophetic and the priestly voice are in direct contest to determine who will speak for God. Often this is the case, the priestly voice is the voice of the settled people where the prophetic is calling people back to obedience. The priestly voice is focused on maintaining an institution, while the prophetic is concerned with faithfulness to their calling. There is always the temptation within a priestly role to tell people what they want to hear, while prophets tend to say the things nobody wants to hear. Ideally an individual would be able to fulfill both callings, but the reality is that both find themselves in tension with one another.

Prophets are rarely appreciated in their own time and in their own lifetime, and sometimes even when they are recognized they are also de-fanged. For example, with Martin Luther King, Jr. we have all become familiar with his ‘I have a dream speech’ but much of his criticism of the war in Vietnam or economic injustices have been muted under the remembrance of him purely as a person who advocated for greater inclusivity of people of all races. I think something similar has happened with Jeremiah, select portions of Jeremiah have made it into the various lectionary systems and Jeremiah doesn’t have the memorable stories of Daniel or Jonah and so his protest is included, he is honored and his protest is forgotten.

Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple by El Greco (1600)

Jeremiah 7:1-15

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: ² Stand in the gate of the LORD’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the LORD, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the LORD. ³ Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. ⁴ Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.”

                ⁵ For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, ⁶ if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, ⁷ then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.

                ⁸ Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. ⁹ Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known,

 ¹⁰ and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”– only to go on doing all these abominations? ¹¹ Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the LORD. ¹² Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. ¹³ And now, because you have done all these things, says the LORD, and when I spoke to you persistently, you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, ¹⁴ therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your ancestors, just what I did to Shiloh. ¹⁵ And I will cast you out of my sight, just as I cast out all your kinsfolk, all the offspring of Ephraim.

Jeremiah 7:1-8:3 is generally thought of by scholars as Jeremiah’s temple sermon, it breaks from the form of poetry in 4-6 and places Jeremiah at the gate of the temple proclaiming against the temple authority. Long before Karl Marx and other modern philosophers talked about religion serving to legitimate the dominant class the prophets railed against the priestly and monarchical authorities propping up their own positions with claims of divine right. To use the language of Liberation theologians God is exercising a preferential option for the poor and oppressed (if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow-these are those without a method of support in the society) and God is not willing to be in competition with other gods-idolatry and injustice are the two rallying cries of the prophet. Specifically appealing to the ten commandments as a central part of the covenant that the people are to live out of and contrasting that to the appearance of trusting in the temple and land rather than the Lord.

Jesus also had significant issues with the temple establishment in his own day, and it is not by chance that Jesus quotes Jeremiah 7:11 when he comes into the temple and throws out the moneychangers. Often there is a focus on the moneychangers, but if you read the context of this within Matthew, Mark and to a lesser extent Luke you can see that the issue is with the temple establishment in general. There is always the danger of any religion becoming a way of authorizing the status quo and it is the prophets who come and upset and challenge this. God has strong words for the temple authority in Jeremiah’s and Jesus’ time and in both cases that temple would be in ruins in the generation that followed.

The position taken by Jeremiah would be viewed as treason by the state, it would be challenging the ideological underpinnings of the religious and the monarchical authorities, it calls people not to trust in the temple.  It attempts to show the people that the temple and the sacrifices they offer cannot cover up a destructive way of life that is out of alignment with God’s covenant with them.  In the gate of the temple Jeremiah is called to challenge the foundations of the way of life of the people and God once again cries out for the people to return to the covenant so once again God may dwell in their midst.

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem by Rembrandt van Rijn 1630

22 Thus says the LORD: See, a people is coming from the land of the north,
a great nation is stirring from the farthest parts of the earth.
23 They grasp the bow and the javelin, they are cruel and have no mercy,
their sound is like the roaring sea; they ride on horses,
equipped like a warrior for battle, against you, O daughter Zion!
24 “We have heard news of them, our hands fall helpless;
anguish has taken hold of us, pain as of a woman in labor.
25 Do not go out into the field, or walk on the road;
for the enemy has a sword, terror is on every side.”
26 O my poor people, put on sackcloth, and roll in ashes;
make mourning as for an only child, most bitter lamentation:
for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us.
27 I have made you a tester and a refiner among my people
so that you may know and test their ways.
28 They are all stubbornly rebellious, going about with slanders;
they are bronze and iron, all of them act corruptly.
29 The bellows blow fiercely, the lead is consumed by the fire;
in vain the refining goes on, for the wicked are not removed.
30 They are called “rejected silver,” for the LORD has rejected them.
We finally come to the end of a long poem that has run from chapter 4-6, and it is the language of pain, or worlds ending, of rejection and yet throughout all of it is the desire for things to be different. Imagine if you would a scenario where a couple has been married for several years, and one spouse has not only been having an affair but has decided that they no longer wants to be married, yet they want to remain in the house. How would the partner react? The partner may want to keep the marriage intact, but would probably not be willing to keep things the way they are, to have invested so much in a relationship and to desire it’s reconciliation only to see their efforts flaunted and then to live with a constant reminder of the brokenness under their roof. Even the most gracious person is going to seek a necessary change to the way things are. Throughout this poem God has desired the people to turn, to change, and yet they do not hear (and perhaps cannot hear). There are too many people proclaiming peace in a time when war is at the gates, prosperity in a time of famine is on the doorstep. The enemy is near, and here at the end of the poem the rumor of their approach has set the people into panic and God or the prophet still desires for them to repent, to put on sackcloth, to roll in ashes, to mourn as for the loss of an only child, yet we hear only the silence about any repentance. They are so corrupted that even switching to the image of metal working, they are all dross and no longer have precious metal left. They are rejected silver or something more familiar to many of us iron pyrite, fool’s gold. The people may look great, but when you find out what they really are the appearance betrays their real nature, and so they are unable to be refined and in the language of the poem they are rejected.
This may be the end of the poem, but this is not the end of the story. There is a long way to go as we walk through the desolation, and I know at times this is a difficult journey for me, but I know that in the distance hope is on the horizon. I cannot imagine remaining in the desolation without the knowledge of the hope that will come.

Icon of Jeremiah

Jeremiah 5: 7-17

 ⁷ How can I pardon you?
Your children have forsaken me, and have sworn by those who are no gods. When I fed them to the full, they committed adultery and trooped to the houses of prostitutes.
 ⁸ They were well-fed lusty stallions, each neighing for his neighbor’s wife.                                                           
 ⁹ Shall I not punish them for these things? says the LORD;
 and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?
 ¹⁰ Go up through her vine-rows and destroy, but do not make a full end;
 strip away her branches, for they are not the LORD’s.
 ¹¹ For the house of Israel and the house of Judah have been utterly faithless to me, says the LORD.
 ¹² They have spoken falsely of the LORD, and have said,
“He will do nothing. No evil will come upon us, and we shall not see sword or famine.”
 ¹³ The prophets are nothing but wind, for the word is not in them. Thus shall it be done to them!
 ¹⁴ Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of hosts:
Because they have spoken this word, I am now making my words in your mouth a fire,
and this people wood, and the fire shall devour them.
 ¹⁵ I am going to bring upon you a nation from far away,
 O house of Israel, says the LORD.
It is an enduring nation,
 it is an ancient nation,
 a nation whose language you do not know,
nor can you understand what they say.
 ¹⁶ Their quiver is like an open tomb;
all of them are mighty warriors.
 ¹⁷ They shall eat up your harvest and your food;
 they shall eat up your sons and your daughters;
 they shall eat up your flocks and your herds;
they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees;
 they shall destroy with the sword your fortified cities in which you trust.
 
R.E.M.’s song It’s the End of the World as We Know it fits well here:

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and 
snakes, an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid. 
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world 
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed 
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, the Ladder 
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire 
in a fire, representing seven games, and a government 
for hire at a combat site. Left of west and coming in 
a hurry with the furys breathing down your neck. Team 
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped. 
Look at that low playing. Fine, then. Uh oh, 
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do to Save 
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, 
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and 
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic, 
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty 
psyched. 

It’s the end of the world as we know it. 
It’s the end of the world as we know it. 
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. 

Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign 
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself 
churn. Lock it in, uniforming, book burning, blood 
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. 
Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down. 
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no 
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament, 
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, 
offer me alternatives and I decline. 

It’s the end of the world as we know it. 
It’s the end of the world as we know it. 
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. 

The prophetic poetry of death continues, as does the language of God’s woundedness. This will continue through much of Jeremiah, for the prophet points to the end of a world. These are words designed to rend the world apart, to point to an end that is coming. This has nothing to do with the frenzy some people get wrapped around thoughts of the end of the world people would talk about in Revelation (and most people fundamentally misunderstand most of Revelation—especially as it has been twisted around in the interpretations in the movies or literature like the Left Behind series). No this is about the end of the world as the people know it. Temple and priest, prophet and king, Jerusalem and Judah, wealth and prosperity, home and heart are all approaching a time when they will all be consumed by war.  God seems to still be looking for a way to pardon, but sees no way and so the end of the relationship is coming so that perhaps out of the death of the relationship something new might evolve. The root is to be left, so that perhaps something new might grow. The prophets words burn and consume, these are words that point to destruction and they are indeed painful for the prophet and their eventual result will consume the people. They point poetically to the future that is on the horizon and the on the horizon is the smoke of an approaching army.

The nation that will eventually come is Babylon, although the prophet may not know who they are at this point. As an American, we are very blessed to not have had a war take place on our soil since the Civil War (1861-1865) and except for those who have served in conflict overseas the utter destruction of warfare has been lost. In an invasion the invading army takes the harvest to feed their soldiers, sons and daughters would be killed, raped or enslaved, flocks become feasts for the invading army, herd become spoils, the fruit of vines and fig trees may be taken, then as in the earlier image in this part of the poem the branches may be stripped away-used in fires or simply burned to deny the food to the residents of the land under siege. Walled cities were the places where people would flee to, but a siege is a horrific experience once food or water becomes short. We will have ample time to deal with the horrors of a siege later in Jeremiah. The future is dark, the words are painful, and the prophet tries to point to a reality that the world as they know it is ending, but apparently the people feel fine.