Canter Bridge

‘Where is YHWH?’

It seems an obvious question to be heard on the lips of a people whose recent past YHWH has permeated with redemptive actions on their behalf. When it is not heard, the prophet suggests, the silence is not only deafening but accusing as well.

Yet it is not such an obvious question, for why should one need to inquire into the whereabouts of a divine presence that is alleged to be almost palpable in its thick beneficence? One does not ask about the whereabouts of the nose on one’s face or the hand that bustles about its business at arm’s length. Why should an activist YHWH require interrogative pursuit?

Three times in these chapters the failure to ask is laid at Israel’s feet as justification for her impending predicament.

The people as a whole are faulted for lack of appreciation and its ordinary consequence of mutuality:

They did not say, ‘Where is the LORD
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that no one passes through,
where no one lives?’

The priests are numbered among those custodians of the nation’s wellbeing who had miserably failed their charge:

The priests did not say, Where is the LORD?
Those who handle the law did not know me;
the rulers transgressed against me;
the prophets prophesied by Baal,
and went after things that do not profit.

Then, with stinging irony, the prophet denounces the people for their remarkable attentiveness to the whereabouts and requirements of gods who—quite unlike YHWH—can do nothing for them:

But where are your gods
that you made for yourself?
Let them come, if they can save you,
in your time of trouble;
for you have as many gods
as you have towns, O Judah.

Jeremiah and his traditioners consider that redemptive actions by YHWH lead organically to appreciative relationship among the parties, a configuration that requires peculiar attentiveness by those who have been rescued from their disparate slaveries. The implication is that YHWH’s presence, even in the orbit of its most intense manifestations, remains fleeting.

One needs to look for it, seek it out, pray under the stones and leaves of ordinary living to discover where YHWH is and, perhaps, where he is going. In the language of discipleship—a dialect that Jeremiah knows well and uses often—YHWH’s going implies the people’s following.

When a people, and especially its functional priests, fail to ask the question, their lacadaisical ignorance is culpable. As our fathers instructed us, ignorance of the law—in this case the narrative-enriched dynamic of YHWH’s love for Israel—is no excuse.

One might ask whether YHWH could be a bit more energetic in telegraphing his movements. One might feel that a little more shared responsibility is in order here.

The prophet will have none of it. ‘Where is YHWH?’, he claims, ought to have become a matter of muscle memory, a recurring thought, a constantly attentive inquiry.

A labor of love.