[Dialogue] Spong 10/23 Jeremiah

[KroegerD at aol.com]

    Thursday October 23, 2008    Origins of the Bible, Part XIV
Jeremiah,  the Prophet of Doom  The book of Jeremiah, the second of the Major 
 Prophets in the Bible after Isaiah, is not only a large and complicated  
piece of writing, but it exhibits no narrative line that can easily be  followed 
or recalled. Most people, including most clergy, could not cite a  single 
passage from this book if you asked them to do so. The book of  Jeremiah does not 
lend itself to memorable prose. I know of no major  scholarly work that has 
been done specifically on this book. No one comes  to mind who might be called a 
"Jeremiah scholar." Yet this book has shaped  many aspects of our religious 
history and quite specifically has helped to  form the Christian story.  
Many of the familiar images that were incorporated into the birth  narratives 
in the gospels of Matthew and Luke were originally found in  Jeremiah. In 
chapters 26 and 27, Israel is referred to as a virgin who is  to bring forth 
God's firstborn son, who will keep Israel as a shepherd  keeps his flock. It is an 
image out of Jeremiah that portrays Rachel as  "weeping for her children who 
were not," which Matthew quotes as the  biblical basis for his story of King 
Herod killing the innocent boy babies  in Bethlehem in his effort to remove 
God's deliverer.  
The words in Jeremiah, "a righteous branch shall spring forth from the  root 
of Jesse," the father of King David, "who will be called the Lord our  
righteousness," may have led to the popular theme that Jesus was the heir  to the 
throne of David. The Hebrew word for root is "nazir," which may be  what Matthew 
was referring to when he wrote that the prophets say Jesus  would be called a 
"Nazarene." Even the story of Mary and Joseph finding no  room in the inn, 
told only by Luke, may have been based on a passage from  Jeremiah, who refers to 
"the hope of Israel" being treated as a stranger  in the land by being turned 
aside," not able to stay "for even a night."  Other biblical themes that find 
mention in Jeremiah deserve a brief  mention.  
    1.  Jeremiah along with Ezekiel, his younger colleague, are the biblical  
voices suggesting that individualism is beginning to appear in the land  of 
Israel about the 6th century BCE. "Every one shall die of his own  sins," 
writes Jeremiah. Individualism will shape substantially the  Jewish idea of life 
after death that emerges in their sacred writings,  called the Apocrypha, around 
200 BCE.  
    2.  There is in Jeremiah a hint of universalism that challenges the  
ancient tribal mentality. This prophet has God refer to Nebuchadnezzar  twice as 
"my servant" and he sees the threat that the Babylonians  represent as God's 
instrument for punishing the waywardness of God's  people.  
    3.  A theme finding expression in Matthew's Parable of the Judgment  
identifying God with justice appears in Jeremiah, who writes that "to  know God is 
also to know the poor and needy."  
    4.  The identification of Israel with a fig tree not bearing fruit, and  
on which even the leaves have withered, may be the origin of the story  told 
in Mark that Jesus laid a curse on a fig tree for not bearing fruit  just 
before the cleansing of the Temple. That fig tree withered to its  roots.  
    5.  The words of the Negro Spiritual "There is a balm in Gilead" come  
from a text in Jeremiah.  
    6.  Jeremiah, like the book of Job, wrestled with the problem of evil.  
"Why do the ways of the wicked prosper?" he asked  
    7.  The early Christians called themselves "the followers of the way."  
That name may come from Jeremiah, who portrays God as setting before the  Jews 
a choice between the way of life and the way of death and demanding  that they 
choose.
Other texts from Jeremiah have been used to  illumine current events. One 
thinks of the present condition of the  American economy, especially in light of 
the seven hundred billion dollar  bailout of Wall Street, when one reads in 
Jeremiah that "everyone is  greedy for unjust gain…..they do not even know how 
to blush." To read of  the insurance giant AIG spending $400,000 to entertain 
lavishly their  independent agents just days after they had been given billions 
of  taxpayer dollars to rescue them from bankruptcy is a case in point. They  
don't realize how out of touch they are. "They don't even blush," nor do  
they "get it."  
My favorite personal recollection involving a text from Jeremiah came  at the 
start of the first Iraq war in 1991. President George H. W. Bush,  trying to 
perfume his military efforts to push back Saddam Hussein, had  Billy Graham 
come to pray with him at the White House as the bombs began  to fall. Using 
religion for political purposes seems to run in that  family. Outside the White 
House that same night were anti-war protestor  and pickets led by the Presiding 
Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Edmond  Browning. One of the signs carried in 
that silent procession quoted words  from Jeremiah, "My heart is beating 
wildly. I cannot keep silent for I  hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of 
war."  
Jeremiah writes of a sense of destiny, maybe even a sense of being  
pre-ordained or predestined for a particular role in life. As such he has  been the 
inspiration for many who found themselves in the right place at  the right time 
and were able to change history. That was what it meant, in  Jeremiah's words, 
to assume the mantle of the prophet. God is reported to  have said to Jeremiah 
in this book, "Before I formed you in the womb I  knew you, and before you 
were born I consecrated you to be a prophet to  the nations."  
Setting Jeremiah in the context of the time through which he lived and  about 
which he wrote might be helpful. His was a particularly difficult  and 
turbulent period of Jewish history. Everything in this book reflects  that fact. The 
Northern Kingdom of Israel had been destroyed in 721 BCE by  the Assyrians, 
who ruled the world with an iron hand until they were  overthrown by the 
Babylonians around the year 612 BCE. Jeremiah watched  the struggle between the 
Egyptians, the Assyrians and the rising power of  the Babylonians, as power ebbed 
and flowed in the region between those two  dates. His sympathies seemed to be 
with the Assyrians, so he was destined  not to be a winner. His little 
country of Judah had escaped the  destruction that had befallen the Northern Kingdom 
only by accepting  vassal status to the Assyrians, so they viewed with alarm 
the rise of  Babylonian power. As a small country they were regularly little 
more than  pawns in the hands of the competing nations of the Middle East. It 
was  best for them when the major powers were tied up jockeying for power  
against each other. This situation had existed before Assyria fell to the  
Babylonians so Judah had enjoyed a period of "Indian summer." It was  during this 
period that the book of Deuteronomy appeared and the  Deuteronomic Reforms took 
place in the land of Judah. Jeremiah may have  been involved with those 
reforms. Some Old Testament scholars think that  Jeremiah was the author of the book 
of Deuteronomy and was involved in the  placing of this book into the walls of 
the Temple where it could be  "discovered" during the time of renovations 
under the popular King Josiah  around the year 621 BCE. However, that is not 
universally agreed to,  though it remains a possibility.  
The hopes of Judah at that time in its history were vested in King  Josiah. 
This young king had succeeded to the throne in 640 BCE, when he  was only eight 
years old. He was enormously popular with the priests and  the prophets 
because of his genuine religious interests. There is even the  suggestion that one 
of the prophets had been his regent prior to the time  he came of age and that 
his religious devotion was the result of that. The  Deuteronomic Reforms, 
about which I have written earlier in this series  (see _The  Origins of the 
Bible, Part VI_ (http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/week296story1_prev.asp) ), 
were very pleasing and affirming to  the religious leaders. The prophet Huldah 
had even suggested when these  reforms were being carried out that God's 
blessing would be on Judah at  least as long as King Josiah lived. So much of their 
hope and their sense  of the security of God's blessing rested in Josiah, who 
was thought to be  their guarantor of God's favor. That is why his death at the 
young age of  thirty-nine was deemed to be almost like the end of the world. 
Pharaoh  Necho of Egypt had marched to war hoping to claim some of Assyria's 
empire  for itself. King Josiah, a former ally of Assyria, set out to intercept 
 the Egyptian force in a battle on the plains of Megiddo in 609 BCE. The  
Jews were defeated and King Josiah was struck down. History unraveled for  the 
Jews from that point on. With Josiah's death Judah's sense of security  died. 
Their Assyrian protector was no longer able to come to their aid.  The powerful 
Babylonians were rising. Judah was on the wrong side of  history. In less than 
ten years the Babylonians would be besieging  Jerusalem. When Jerusalem fell 
in 596 BCE, the Babylonian Exile began.  
Jeremiah saw this impending calamity and warned of its coming with  
regularity. No one heeded him. His message was so relentless and so  hopeless that they 
actually wanted to kill him. Jerusalem was a city that  had not been invaded 
for four hundred years. People did not believe that  it could be taken. He 
likened what was about to befall Judah to the time  when they were slaves in 
Egypt. No image could have been more fearful.  When his message came true and his 
nation was prostrate, Jeremiah was  carted off to Egypt, where he died in 
poverty and of a broken spirit. One  image of Jeremiah is that of a weeping 
prophet, even a madman. Both are  accurate. Time, however, is usually a prophet's 
greatest friend. At some  time after his death the words of Jeremiah were added 
to the sacred story  of the Jews and thus were preserved as scripture. So we 
have access to his  words, painful though some of them are, and his truth was 
validated.  
The job of the prophet is to illumine the pain, not to eliminate it, to  help 
people walk through it and to transcend it. It is not helpful to deny  the 
pain and pretend that there is another reality in which the pain is  not 
present. Jeremiah was in this tradition. Perhaps that is what the  world needs today 
as it stands on the brink of a worldwide recession and  all the political 
dislocation that this will inevitably bring. 
– John Shelby Spong
 
____________________________________
Question and Answer 
With John  Shelby Spong   
Dave Wismer, from Barrie, Ontario, Canada, writes: I am an  Anglican living 
in Barrie and have been informed that the incumbent  minister of our parish has 
told the one chosen to be Warden that he could  not serve if he remained a 
Shriner. I thought that the freemason movement  upheld the tenets of most world 
religions. Is there a canon of the Church  detailing the qualifications of a 
Warden? Is it fair to assume that this  is another man-made interpretation of 
some passage of scripture to make  the freemason movement evil? Look forward to 
hearing from you.   
Dear Dave, 
I think some clergy seem to have trouble with the freemason movement  because 
it is a quasi-religious movement that competes with the Church. In  my 
career, I have accommodated members of my congregation who wanted to  have a Masonic 
funeral and always was able to work it out. I simply  concluded the Church's 
funeral service and let the masons do what they  wished. I do not think the 
time of death is a time to debate the theology  of freemasonry. I must admit, 
however, to being amused at the mason's  description of heaven as "The Great 
Lodge in the Sky." Some churches,  especially on the right wing of Christianity, 
either Catholic or  Protestant, seem to have more trouble than I did.  
There is nothing in the Canons of the Episcopal Church in the United  States 
that prohibits a mason from serving as a Church Warden. I do not  think there 
is in the Anglican Church of Canada either, but if I am  incorrect, I invite 
Canadian Anglicans to let me know (and they will  whether I invite them to or 
not). I would guess this is a personal point  of view by your local incumbent 
pastor. I suggest you go to him and ask  him. He may have had some experience 
in the past that caused him to take  this position, but do him the honor of 
asking him before you make  judgments. It should not be the battlefield on which 
the Warden or the  minister is willing to die.  
My great mentor, John Elbridge Hines, opened his sermons regularly with  the 
prayer: "And when we would make much of that which cannot matter much  to 
thee, forgive us." That prayer might be appropriate in this situation.  
My best to the people of Barrie,
John Shelby  Spong

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