Jeremiah 17:5-10 Commentary

Tie-In Across Lectionary Texts

Sometimes, especially with the Hebrew Scripture text, our best bet is to read it as supplement and complement to the other texts chosen on a given Sunday.  This week’s lectionary readings lend themselves that way this week.

Across all the lectionary readings this week, with the possible exception of the epistle, is a simple kind of wisdom formula.  Those who trust in their own strength, in the strength of the institution or nation (which are built by humans) around them will find themselves sorely disappointed.  Trusting a comfortable status quo is not the same thing as trusting in God, and at some point, that first kind of trust will collapse.  For the believer, however, that collapse needn’t signal the end but, rather, a new beginning that comes with placing our trust in the Lord.  From an arid land, where drought has killed and the salt in the water and the ground make it so that nothing can live (Jeremiah 17:5-6) to a tree planted by steams of living (fresh, not salt or even brackish) water (Psalm 1.) And all of this says with imagery what Jesus says straight out in Luke’s version of the beatitudes there is a great reversal on its way. Here we bring in the epistle reading, which demonstrates that all human and earthly turns of fortune must arise out of the dead coming alive, the resurrection of Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 15:12-20).

Commentary:

John Goldingay sets this portion of Jeremiah (17:5-10) as part of a larger section, the second scroll of Jeremiah that includes chapters 7 through 24. He notes the shift from first person in the preceding section to third person in chapters 7-24, which makes sense if this section was collated from Jeremiah’s writings sometime after his death.  Whereas he wrote: I did this or I saw that in the first section, here, especially in verses 11:1; 14:1; 18:1; 21:1; the text refers to Jeremiah, saying he did this or he saw that.

In chapter 17, verses 1-11, Jeremiah seems to be pulling from the Jewish wisdom tradition in order to make sense of the people’s present predicament. In an alien land (quite literally) he is offering some landmarks by which the people might again situate themselves within a familiar story that is also God’s story.

The Bad News

While Jeremiah relies on imagery from the wisdom tradition, especially noting the parallel between verse 5 and Psalm 1, he overlays a curse/blessing formulation that resonates more with something like the Deuteronomic tradition, which ,according to Goldingay, “describe as cursed anyone who commits certain acts (making an image being the first) and as blessed anyone who listens to Yahweh’s commands…As is effectively the case in Deuteronomy, being cursed means losing a place in this country and ending up somewhere less hospitable. “ This, then, resonates deeply and sorrowfully for God’s people addressed in Jeremiah.

Goldingay continues: “Yet in Jeremiah’s time, the political context kept raising the question of the nation’s reliance, through the period from Josiah’s reign to Zedekiah’s (and cf. 2:18)” on a kind of strong man.  The Hebrew word used for man in vs. 5 is not a generic term for humanity but has a connotation of something like a “macho” or “strong” man.  The people would prefer to hide behind a hero than trust the Lord out in the open. Unfortunately, heroes like that are human and so subject to human frailty and weakness, just the like the rest of us.  All of this, then, is a set up for disappointment.

The Good News

Painting a scene of great contrast, then, Jeremiah says the one who trusts in the Lord as their “strong man” will be blessed. Rather than the disappointment that leads to failure to thrive in the difficult days of drought, this tree in verse 8 “does not fear when the heat comes…It has no worries in a year of drought.”  Its resources are sufficient such that it can thrive and bear fruit, which is to say serve its purpose.

Goldingay summarizes the promise like this: “The allegory’s positive implication is that king and people need to rely on Yahweh for their fate; they will then have no need to be anxious about their political future. Jeremiah’s declaration or promise is not that the faithful have an easy life, uncomplicated by challenges and problems. They have to face heat and drought. But they are able to do so.”

In Summary

In a sense, the last two verse of this pericope function well as a summary.

It is an error to trust in the supposed strength of a “strong man” because the human mind — both in the trusting and being deserving of trust — falls short.  Interestingly, the better translation is “mind” but many English versions prefer heart.  This contributes to a belief, in many Christian circles—-though more in keeping with an Enlightenment modernism than anything inherently biblical—-that the heart/emotions/affect are weak and self-deceptive but that our minds/logic/knowledge will always set us straight.  In either case, what ails humanity is “beyond cure.” This is an uncommon word that Jeremiah uses more often than anyone else.  It usually “qualifies the description of a wound or a sorrow (15:18; 30:12, 15) and will shortly describe the grim nature of the day of disaster that is coming (17:16).”  So, in verse 9 we have the bad news restated in brief.

Then, in verse 10, we turn to God who knows us through and through, even dealing with those things we cannot know within ourselves. This is not to say God only cares about what happens in the human heart.  God is also deeply invested in human behavior. Goldingay asserts that both the intention and the action matter to God. “Jeremiah’s point here is that God is not taken in when people say they will do or are doing one thing but are secretly planning or doing another.”  Nonetheless, human action begins in human feeling, thought and imagination — what Augustine would call “the affections.” And so, perhaps the famous words of the Anglican collect for confession are helpful to us here:

“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.”