Jeremiah 1:4-10 Commentary

Commentary:

Why Does God Prefer the Cotton-Mouthed?

The keen reader of Scripture might wonder, when reading this week’s Hebrew Scripture text, “where have I heard that before?”  In response to God’s call, Jeremiah protests, “I know not how to speak,.”  Both Moses and Isaiah claimed the same malady but neither of them got out of it and neither will Jeremiah.  And, in both cases, God provided resources: a sidekick for Moses and a seraph with a hot coal for Isaiah.  Similarly, here, “The Lord said to me, ‘Look, I have put My words in your mouth.”  Jeremiah might have preferred the moral support but was probably glad to dodge the coal.

Jeremiah, A Biography

While it is never easy to be a prophet of the Lord, Jeremiah seemed to have it harder than most.  From the start, with his protests of incoherence and youth, you just know Jeremiah didn’t want this job.  And, for national as well as personal reasons, that hesitancy makes sense.

100 years earlier, the Northern Kingdoms (the 10 tribes) had been routed and exiled by the Assyrians. For the Southern Kingdom, that their greatest fear proved reality so close to home, among tribes of their kinsman created a haunting sense that never really left them. Threats of invasion and military violence sounded louder in their ears because they knew it could really happen.

Despite the legal and religious reforms under King Josiah, Jeremiah kept up his steady — and often graphic — depictions of coming devastation.  He argues these will come as a result of the Israelites’ interest in and toleration of false gods in their nation. (Linguistic side note: this is where the term “jeremiad” originated.) Eventually, around 597 B.C.E. and, again, 10 years later, Jeremiah was right. But no one likes a prophet who is right, if that prophet is right about their demise.  So, he was exiled, threatened with violence, even death, thrown in jail cells and dried up wells.

According to the Interpretation Bible commentary, Jeremiah “ultimately and unflinchingly fulfilled these tasks through his sense that God had not only commanded him to prophesy but had empowered him to do so. Had not the prophets who had gone before Jeremiah experienced the same divine empowering?” Jeremiah never lost faith in his dream of a restored and reunited Northern and Southern Kingdom of Israel. He held out remarkable hope in a “new covenant”  Again from Alter, “That upbeat message was dictated by an underlying theological assumption on the part of this harbinger of doom that, although God chastises Israel, His commitment to His people is for all time.”

And Then What?

The retelling of Jeremiah’s call takes the form of a dialogue in which God speaks God’s claim over Jeremiah’s life that extends backward, even “before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” And then it records Jeremiah’s response to God’s call, which is along the lines of “are you sure this is a good idea?!” At last, in verses 7-10, God speaks and God acts to strengthen Jeremiah in his task.  But where is Jeremiah’s positive, affirmative verbal consent?

Rather than Jeremiah’s voice agreeing to God’s call, what we find, instead, is a whole book dedicated to showing Jeremiah’s willingness — often against great odds, as we’ve previously noted — to fulfill his commission.

Jesus, the Prophet in his Hometown

The calling of Jeremiah provides a great tie-in with the Gospel Lectionary reading for this week in which Jesus preaches in his hometown to rather disastrous results.  In that case, he told the people gathered in the synagogue that God was not only for the Jews but would — and, indeed, already had — included the Gentiles.  No one like a prophet who is right, if that prophet is right about the fact that they have to share.  So, too, the people listening to Jesus were so angry, they drove him out of town and walked him to the side of a cliff “but he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” Prophets in Hebrew Scripture and in the Gospels gonna keep prophesying!

Robert Alter writes, “Against this background, one readily understands that Jeremiah saw his prophetic mission as a source of unending personal torment.” And “Jeremiah figures as a kind of prisoner of conscience: he is acutely aware that conveying his message of scathing castigation and impending doom at the very moment that Babylonian army is descending on Jerusalem will bring him nothing but humiliation and angry rejection.”  And yet he remains compelled by the God who calls him in this week’s lectionary text.  That consecration never left him.

Illustration:

Dean Stroud’s 2013 book, Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich gives remarkable testimony to the beleaguered and faithful prophets in Germany’s Confessing Church.  What I appreciate about Stroud’s approach is that, for the most part, he didn’t choose sermons that would be classified as “jeremiads.” Instead he saw success in even small acts of defiance, like preaching from Hebrew Scripture, which was banned in the churches.  He celebrates Barth’s sermon on the Jewishness of Jesus.  He delights in Bonhoeffer’s decision to refer to the Israelites as God’s “volk” (the German, nationalist term for the Aryan people) as a way of subverting the prevailing narrative.

Stroud writes, “With so little sympathy for Christian virtues, every sermon that advocated basic Christian virtues challenged the Nazi way of being … the most basic Christian truths — that God is love, that we are to be imitators of Christ whose love for us reaches its pinnacle at Golgotha, that we are to forgive ‘seventy times seven,’ and that God will judge each of us against his standard rather than the world’s — presented a fundamental challenge to everything Hitler and his followers represented.”

Just as in Jeremiah’s day and despite his witness, the Southern Kingdom did fall and was exiled, so too, despite the witness of the Confessing Church, Germany was swept away in nationalist, authoritarian fervor. The Barmen Confession and the preaching that emerged out of it may be seen as ‘too little, too late’ but, taken in context, pastors were potentially sacrificing their liberty, if not their lives, to preach in these ways.  Were the prophets in Germany successful? No.  Were they sufficient? Also, no. But, were they non-existent? No.