Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Commentary

The Politics of Babylon

Jeremiah is coming at God’s people with every attempt he can think of in hopes of stirring them out of complacency.  The emotional appeals run the gamut: grief, anger, provocation, reasoning, coaxing.

He sees the people jockeying for power, attempting alliances with this super-power and then another.  He observes their systemic unfairness and unjust actions toward one another as symptoms of their greater allegiance to the powers and principalities of this world replacing their covenant fidelity to God.  Meanwhile, the super-powers they seek to impress are only interested in subsuming and quelling Judah into submission.  It’s a fool’s bargain and Jeremiah is desperate for God’s people to see that.

In the Africana Bible Commentary, Madipoane Masenya observes, “I am captivated by the book of Jeremiah’s ability to expose human pride in institutional power and to warn the powerful to act responsibly when in such positions.”  She argues, “The impact of Babylonian imperialism on Judah would not only severely influence Judah’s inhabitants but also become the core of Jeremiah’s message.  For Jeremiah, but perhaps contrary to the perceptions of most of his hearers, these were not mere political events. They formed an integral part of Judah’s deviation from the covenant stipulations.”

In other words, this is not simply a matter of worldly politics, immanent causes and power plays.  God is at work in all of this.  God has a different way of being in the world and God longs for God’s people to live out and love this different way of being with each other and as a counter-witness to the powers and principalities of this world.  Thus, God is angry at the careless way God’s people want to play by the rules of this world, its empires and tyrants.

Creation Undone

The anger of this passage is stunning and, perhaps nowhere is it as raw and alarming as in verses 22-25 in which the author intentionally twists the familiar language of the creation story in Genesis 1.  For example, the world began “formless and void,” or—to use Robert Alter’s translation—“welter and waste.”  Only in Jeremiah 4, we are not building and creating out of nothingness, rather God is threatening to return what we have built and created to its original state: “I saw the earth, and, look, welter and waste, the heavens, and their light was gone.”

Robert Alter calls this passage “one of the most striking instances in which the hyperbole of Prophetic poetry pushes it toward apocalyptic vision., almost despite itself.”  While the reality of Jeremiah’s situation is better captured by verses 26 and following where invaders come in and bring desolation, before he gets to that image, he plays with the immensity of the people’s ruination “by invoking the language of creation from Genesis 1, he conjures up a vision of reversing the very act of creation: if the world was one created out of welter and waste, when primordial darkness reigned over all, the process might be turned backward, everything reverting to its uncreated state.”

This is the stuff of horror genre. The light disappears (v.23), the land breaks apart (24), the earth is no longer inhabitable for people (v.25)

“Jeremiad”

The firehose of vitriol on display in this week’s Hebrew Scripture lectionary text is so consistent with Jeremiah’s brand of writing that a whole word has been created in the English language based on it.  A “jeremiad” is “a complaining tirade.”  Robert Alter explains the provenance of the word “so often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants.”

Jeremiah’s greatest concern includes the people’s acts of injustice and systemic unfairness but it digs deeper than that.  These acts are symptomatic of a great wrong, something Alter characterizes as “Judah’s whoring after strange gods (the sexual metaphor is often flaunted) and the devastation of the nation that it will inevitably bring about.”

Illustration:

Although the language of his poetry may be antiquated now, his concern for the failings of a people should be familiar to us today.  Alexander Pope wrote his own version of a “Jeremiad” in the early 18th century.  A satirist who poked at the “strange gods” of the Enlightenment era in which he wrote.  Book 4 of his poem, Dunciad, warns of encroaching chaos and dullness (see the similarities in metaphor with Jeremiah 4:23) as a result of the people chasing after science, wit, logic and reason. He refers to this chaos and dullness as “an uncreating word,” which Pope decries as “sophistry” resulting in the removal of all transcendence and divinity.

“Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal Darkness buries All.”

In other words, Pope accomplished in poetry what Charles Taylor takes hundreds of pages of dense prose to explain to us 250+ years later.

“All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide,

Mother of Arrogance, and Source of Pride!

We nobly take the high Priori Road,

And reason downward, till we doubt of God:

Make Nature still encroach upon his plan;

And shove him off as far as e’er we can:

Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place;

Or bind in matter, or diffuse in space.”

The text of the poem is long and not easy for preachers during the week or (most) congregations on Sunday morning but the wit of it is arresting and worth reading if only to wonder: if I were to write of those foibles—silly, salacious and life-threatening—that assail God’s people today, what would I name?  And how can I do it with some measure of Pope’s playfulness so that God’s people will recognize themselves before they have capacity to reject the accusation?