Day 223. Jeremiah 15-17

There is deep ambiguity in Jeremiah's attitude toward his calling and the One who has called him to it. From the beginning he had expressed his feeling of insufficiency for the task, and again and again throughout the book that bears his name we sense the tension in him between love for God and revulsion at the message he is called to deliver. By turns he expresses both pride in being a Chosen One, God's friend and confidante and humiliation and pain in being separated from ordinary life. He is a young man, and he resents his unnatural isolation. He is divided by his loyalty to God and his affection for the people of Israel, of which he is part. He engages in an extended, uneven argument with the LORD, in which he gallantly takes the part of Israel against God's anger.
We step into the midst of this argument as we begin today's reading. Jeremiah had sought to mediate between God and his people, and extract a promise of mercy. But now the LORD tells him: "Though Moses and Samuel"—the greatest of the prophets Israel produced—"stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward the people. Send them out of my sight and let them go!" (15:1). Having seen the northern kingdom of Israel vanish into exile, the LORD is now determined to destroy the southern kingdom as well. He tells the prophet that he has "appointed over them four kinds of destroyers . . . . : the sword to kill, the dogs to drag away, the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth to devour and destroy" (15:3). And for his immutable fury, he blames what King Manasseh son of Hezekiah did in Jerusalem (15:4).
This seems curious in that King Manasseh had by this time been dead for forty years. But his attempts to establish idolatry in the kingdom of Judah were not forgotten. We remember him from our previous readings as a very wicked king. The writer of 2 Chronicles makes a colorful list of his sins which concludes thus—"Manasseh misled Judah and the inhabitants, so that they did more evil than the nations whom the LORD had destroyed before the people of Israel" (2 Chronicles 33:9). But the Chronicler also tells us that while he was a hostage of the King of Assyria Manasseh prayed for forgiveness and "humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors," and as a consequence the LORD restored him to Jerusalem and to his throne, where he did various pious and useful things before he died. Here Manasseh serves as a symbol of apostasy and unfaithfulness. The people have continued to follow his bad example and now no offer of repentance is to be
given to them—the people of Jerusalem and their kings have rejected the LORD, and he is "weary of relenting" (16:6).
Because of his unrelenting message of doom, Jeremiah is greatly hated, and he is fully aware of his own unpopularity—and pained by it. "Woe is me, my mother," he laments, "that you ever 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" (15:10). But the LORD replies: "Surely I have intervened in your life for good. . . ." How is this so? To be noticed by God and called to a special task is its own reward. And Jeremiah admits to the joy his calling has at times given him. "Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to be a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts" (15:16).
But his calling as a prophet and truth-sayer has also made him unfit for human companionship. His message has isolated him from his family and his community, and it fills him with indignation against them (15:17). His pain and tension are unceasing (15:18); he both loves and abhors his calling. And what makes the situation even worse—God's voice comes intermittently. He is often left alone and in silence. The LORD is to him "like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail" (15:18).
But without denying the truth of all this, God makes Jeremiah a promise: "It is they"—those ruthless people who persecute him—"who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them" (15:19). You will not be overcome. You will not fail. The LORD promises to give the prophet the strength of will to withstand his enemies—"I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the LORD" (15:20).
Has the prophet been considering marriage? We don't know--probably. Israelite men—and women too—married at what we would consider a very early age. Not to marry in that society would have been a very strange decision indeed, paramount to renouncing any hope of achieving any meaningful existence after death. Children were immortality in ancient Israel. But the LORD tells Jeremiah to dismiss the thought of having a family. "You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place" (16:2). It is a harsh command, which leaves him quite alone with his terrible job. But by his celibacy Jeremiah's life becomes a parable—a living symbol of the brutal times ahead when not having the encumbrance of wife or children will be regarded as a mercy. So God tells the prophet—"I am going to banish from this place, in your days and before your eyes, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the
voice of the bride" (16:9).
But life will go on, that is the assurance Jeremiah receives, together with his message of doom. Death will not triumph utterly--God will not allow it. He cannot. He must keep his covenant promise. "The days are surely coming," the prophet is told, when the LORD will gather the people of Israel "out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he has driven them," and he "will bring them back to their own land that [he] gave to the ancestors" (16:14-15). And in "this time," the LORD promises that he is "going to teach them [his] power and [his] might, and they shall know that [his] name is the LORD" (16:21).
But in the present time "the sin of Judah" is written "on their hearts" and smeared "on the horns of their altar" like the blood of their sacrifices. Only their suffering and their exile "in a land [they] do not know" will make atonement for those sins. This is the punishment the LORD demands as the price of his forgiveness. In the "wisdom psalm" found in 17:5-13 the LORD celebrates his own justice. The wicked who turn away from the LORD wither and die, and their names "shall be recorded in the underworld" (17:13). But "those who trust in the LORD . . . are like a tree planted by water" . . . which "in a year of drought . . . is not anxious, and . . . does not cease to bear fruit (17:8). It is God's nature to be just, punishing the evil and rewarding the good.
But when the prophet, seeking only to be a truth messenger, trusts in the LORD and delivers his message faithfully, he is only rewarded with ridicule. He complains to the Lord and demands justice. He protests his faithfulness—that he "did not run away from being a shepherd in [the] service" of the LORD (17:16). In spite of their taunts, he has not spitefully "desired the fatal day." And at the same time, he begs God not to become "a terror" to him or abandon him, but to be his "refuge in the day of disaster" (17:17).
And the LORD rewards him with another message to deliver. This time Jeremiah preaches to the people, both high and low, at the gates of Jerusalem, denouncing their flagrant misuse of the Sabbath. The restates the commandment of Moses—"Keep the Sabbath day holy and do not work in it" (17:24). If they obey that commandment, their "city shall be inhabited forever" (17:25) and worshippers will flock there to offer sacrifices in the temple. But if they "do not listen" and refuse to keep the Sabbath holy, the LORD "will kindle a fire in its gates . . . [that] shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and shall not be quenched" (17:27).