Jeremiah 37:3-21
“Now Jeremiah was still going in and out among the people, for he had not yet been put in prison. 5Meanwhile, the army of Pharaoh had come out of Egypt; and when the Chaldeans who were besieging Jerusalem heard news of them, they withdrew from Jerusalem. 6Then the word of the LORD came to the prophet Jeremiah: 7Thus says the LORD, God of Israel: This is what the two of you shall say to the king of Judah, who sent you to me to inquire of me, Pharaoh’s army, which set out to help you, is going to return to its own land, to Egypt. 8And the Chaldeans shall return and fight against this city; they shall take it and burn it with fire.” (Jeremiah 37:4-8)
Reading the prophets is always a lesson in the politics and geo-politics of their day. The prophets cannot be idly read outside of their very unique and specific contexts. They can, of course, be interpreted to our own context (Jesus does as much starting with His inaugural sermon in Luke 4), but this is only possible once we understand what they were saying in the context they originally said it.
Today’s reading is nice because there is enough “context clues” to at least piece together the historical milieu for Jeremiah’s words and actions. Israel is under threat from the Chaldeans (Chaldeans were a people who existed prior to Babylon and were eventually absorbed into the Babylonian empire; they resided in what is today, modern-day Iraq). However, all is not lost, because the Egyptians are sending support troops to Israel. However, the Chaldeans learn of this and retreat far enough away that when the Egyptian troops show up for a fight, they have no one to fight with. Discouraged and bored, the Egyptians will leave shortly after, assuming that the threat has been neutralized.
Jeremiah, though, recognizes that “retreat” and “surrender” are two very different words. And, especially, that “retreat” and “safety-because-of-a-victory” are two very different realities. And so, he speaks prophetically and politically (for the two are rarely far apart from one another) to the King of Judah. He warns that the Chaldeans (or Babylonians) are definitely going to burn Jerusalem to the ground, even if all that remains of them are their injured men in the tents. For his troubles of warning the powers that be of this impending threat, he is incarcerated. A loose pretense of his traveling habits (see verses 12-16 for more on that) is used to justify this incarceration. Even after the king springs him from this prison, he is still retained – albeit in more comfortable conditions.
I know that we all come to scripture seeking a good word for our lives that we can use to help us be a little more faithful this day. Scripture, however, is more complex than that. It has good words, to be sure, but it also has a full story that must be taken in and processed carefully for those words to come out. In other words, we often have to put in some work to get our desired good word.
And what would that work look like for us, today, with this passage? It would look like deconstructing some of our own pretense around “the separation of church and state.” It would look like attending carefully to the words of those we otherwise try to silence or remove from society because their words inconvenience us. It would look like reviewing our history to see where we’ve failed to do this in the past with the hopes that we won’t fail in the same ways in the future.
Why history? Because Jeremiah’s words weren’t canonized as “scripture” until well after his lifetime. During his actual life, as is evidenced by all the subterfuge and imprisonment leveled against him, he was regarded as very little more than a nuisance or rabble-rouser. It was only after Israel had time to live its life together that it realized it previously had a prophet in their midst. And so, they canonized his story as a reminder to future generations to pay attention to those who are saying the uncomfortable, inconvenient, and even inconceivable thing today.
In honor of the prophet Jeremiah, we do well to look back over our own histories and think of the “rabble-rousers” in our own lives. We do well to reconsider what they’ve said and did – and whether the Lord bore that out with any accuracy. It’s a truism that all prophets are reviled in their own times (this is even true for our Lord Jesus Christ), but past mistakes do not have to be future errors too. We can – and should – learn and grow as we routinely review the past to help us be more faithful in the future. That is, at any rate, the prophet’s good word to us today. Amen.
