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The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 23)
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The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Jeremiah 36:1-10
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Jeremiah 36:1-10
✛
Even Jehoiakim
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It is odd to think of the office of prophet as one that carries on for years and years, the way someone might be a teacher for several decades, or how Vin Scully was an announcer for the Brooklyn, and then Los Angeles, Dodgers for 67 years, before his retirement last week.
Yet we heard today, in our first reading, that the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah was a grizzled veteran when he dictated a scroll’s worth of prophecies to his scribe Baruch. Apparently Jeremiah had been speaking to the people, at the command of the Lord, for 23 years at that point, early in the seventh century BC, as Judah was under the yoke of Egypt. He relayed words of warning and calls to repentance. From the beginning, he gave them ominous, but vague, predictions of an enemy that would come from the north and destroy Jerusalem. From the beginning, warnings about the consequences of the people’s worshipping foreign gods, turning away from the God of Israel who was protecting them.
And, for decades, he had been ignored at best, more often being threatened and, as we heard tonight, banished from the Temple. With no specific threat at hand—nothing precise to point to—his words were disregarded.
In our reading tonight, however, events have overtaken them and Judah is in crisis. As a result of a battle at Carchemish, in which the forces of Egypt were defeated, Jeremiah knows that it is going to be Babylonia that will be the instrument of Jerusalem’s destruction, sweeping into Judah from the north, destroying its communities, taking its people into exile. It is not for nothing that Jeremiah is sometimes referred to as “the prophet of doom.” The day of doom was coming for Judah, and the Lord wanted to offer his people one more chance—one final opportunity to come around and see the error of their ways. The Lord’s patience is exhausted, having been for so long faithful to an unfaithful people. The barbarians are at the gate. The forces of Babylonia are gathering. Egypt is vulnerable, and so Judah is vulnerable. They need their God more than ever, but they don’t seem to know it.
So one last chance. The Lord instructs that the years of verbal prophesies that have been given to Jeremiah should now be written down and presented to the Temple and to the king. All of them should be dictated to Baruch and recorded on a scroll, because the time is at hand. Those decades of prophesies should be collected in the hope that the terrible consequences of their actions could be avoided, simply by a turn to the Lord.
It would be wonderful to be able to say that these years of preparation paid off for Jeremiah with a successful outcome; that, recognizing his authority and respecting his long experience, the people finally heeded his warnings; that the leadership, brought face to face with the threat they faced, ran back to God. How wonderful would it have been if the king of Judah had responded to Jeremiah the way that the people of Nineveh responded to Jonah—realizing the error of their ways, making amends, changing their lives.
It was not to be. We heard how Baruch read Jeremiah’s prophecy to the Temple; Baruch will go next to the palace of Jehoiakim himself, the king of Judah. Even though Jehoiakim had had the great Josiah as his father, he was terrible for Judah, reinstituting the heathen practices of idol worship. Where Josiah had sought to bring his people into right relationship with the Lord, Jehoiakim was fine with being a vassal king beholden to Egypt, who had put him on the throne in the first place.
We did not hear it tonight but, having been handed the scroll while reclining lazily on his throne, reading these words of condemnation and warning, Jehoiakim will not only ignore them, but take out his penknife, casually cut out the parts of the scroll that he does not like, and throw them into the fire. Sentence by sentence, word by word, removing the offending passages, so he did not have to hear the ugly truth.
What Jeremiah sees, and Jehoiakim and the others do not, is not only the coming Babylonian threat, but that the real problem for Judah lies within the recesses of their hearts, in their lack of faithfulness. Relying on Egypt for military strength, and the mere existence of the Temple for spiritual assurance, the community does not feel the threatening nature of their situation. They have turned aside and found other gods, foregoing their trust in God alone. It is God alone, who chose them out of all the nations of the earth, who can protect them; God alone, who blessed them with his blessing; God alone, who loves them as a mother loves her children. And it was God alone, on whom they had turned their backs.
And it would be God alone who would be on Jeremiah’s side when he was viciously opposed by the religious leadership and by the ruling classes. Even Jeremiah’s family would turn their backs on him. He is called the “weeping prophet” as well—the consequence, perhaps, of being the prophet of doom—weeping not only for Jerusalem, but for himself. Like Job, he curses his birth, resents the role he has been given. But to God alone he clung, and he would still be there when Jehoiakim was gone.
Allegiances would shift a few more times before this story reaches its eventual conclusion. It would be Zedekiah, not Jehoiakim, who would be the king of Judah when Babylonia did indeed come into Jerusalem in 586 BC (or thereabouts). Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, the weeping prophet, would be by Zedekiah’s side as well, still making his case, still imploring the king to return to the Lord. It would be too late at that point, and by the waters of Babylon they would sit down and weep when they remembered Zion.[1] Jerusalem would be destroyed and its upper classes exiled, with only a few left behind among the charred remains of the ruined city.
Even then, however, in their darkest days, God would not abandon them. Even in Babylon, he would be with them; even with Jerusalem’s walls breached, another future lay ahead of them. The God who is faithful and true, merciful and loving, had made a promise, generations before, that through Israel the nations of the world would be blessed, and God keeps his promises.
More specifically, he had promised that it would be from the house of David that the Messiah would come. Though there would never again be a king of an independent Judah, St. Matthew tells us that the king of kings—Jesus the Christ—was a part of that Davidic line—the line that even includes Jehoiakim. Even Jehoiakim would be part of God’s plan to extend his mercy to the whole world.[2]
So weep not, Jeremiah. Those years of prophetic labor were not in vain, because even through the darkest days of doom, God is at work, bringing to all of his people light and life.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
_______________
[1] Psalm 137, authorship traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah.
[2] Matthew does not, however, include Jehoiakim’s name in his genealogy, moving from Jehoiakim’s father, Josiah, directly to his son, Jechoniah: “And Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon” (1:11 KJV).
