Walter Brueggemann in his book “Hopeful Imagination – Prophetic Voices in Exile” says Jeremiah was “intended to help the community of faith make two crucial and difficult moves, relinquishment and receiving.” He wrote that “God’s powerful governance is displacing the present idolatrous order of public life and is generating a new order that befits God’s will for the world.” God was ending their known world and inviting them to a new world of obedience and praise. Jeremiah’s task was “to help his community to face the loss of the old world of king and temple and to receive a new world defined by Yahweh.” Jeremiah’s people “wanted neither to lose the old Davidic-Jerusalem world nor to receive a new world at the hands of the Babylonian empire. So they engaged in denial, self-deception, and wishful thinking.” [1]
“Jeremiah lived in a time of turmoil. He believed it was a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition. He watched his world dying and he felt pain. What pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to notice, to care, to acknowledge, or to admit. He could not determine whether they were too stupid to understand, or whether they were so dishonest that they understood but engaged in an enormous cover-up. He could not determine whether it was a grand public deception or a pitiful self-deception. But he watched. The dying seemed so clear, so inexorable. Yet they denied. In different moments, he indicts his people of both stupidity and stubbornness.” [2]
Brueggemann wrote that Jeremiah’s enemies “are the managers of the status quo, who deceive themselves and others into pretending that there is no illness. They are fascinated with statistics. They are skillful speakers at press conferences. They believe their own propaganda. They imagine that God loves rather than judges, that the Babylonian threat will soon disappear, that the economy is almost back to normal, that Judean values will somehow survive, that religion needs to be affirmative, that things will hold together if we all hug each other.”
“In a word, they believe that grief is treason, that candor about what is underneath only causes failure or nerves and weakens the entire enterprise. They are into happiness and optimism and well-being. Is this not the indictment that Jeremiah makes?” [3]
“The grief of Jeremiah was at two levels. First, it was the grief he grieved for the end of his people. And that was genuine grief because he cared about this people, and he knew that God cared about this people. But the second dimension of his grief, more intense, was because no one would listen, and no one would see what was so apparent to him.” “Jeremiah had seen what was there for all to see if only they would look, but the others refused to look, simply denied, and were unable to see.” [4]
The promises God has brought to my attention for this season are: “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with joy, carrying sheaves with them.” “Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” [5]
[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Hopeful Imagination – Prophetic Voices in Exile”, Fortress Press, ©1986, p. 3-5, 12
[2] Ibid, p. 32 with references to Jeremiah 4:22; 18:12
[3] Ibid, p. 42 with references to Jeremiah 28:2-4; 38:4
[4] Ibid, pp. 47, 48
[5] Psalm 126:5-6; Galatians 6:9
