Canter Bridge

Jeremiah comes down to us not only as the weeping prophet. He is also a most realistic seer.

The text allows us to intuit the presence of many prophetic good-timers, making their rounds in the streets of besieged Jerusalem and claiming against the evidence of the Babylonian troops just over the wall that YHWH would never allow his prime-time city to be destroyed. They proclaimed an imminent miracle, an inviolable city, and an unconditional divine choice.

Such bearers of sunny news no doubt carried the day with those most eager for and attentive to the playing of the spiritual card.

In the end, they were simply wrong. The Jeremiah tradition considers them to have been lying prophets, a particularly hard-hitting indictment in a context where the prophets were a people’s last, best recourse for clarity when all was smoke and whispers.

Jeremiah’s message was entirely contrary to this good-news-mongering. He saw the city’s destruction as a given, a matter of time, an historical and divinely wrought inevitability that did not so much signal YHWH’s abandonment of his inviolate residence but rather his severe care for its potential and its future.

Jeremiah’s counsel was to make the best that could be made of Babylon. The loss of everything, in this view, was to prove no less excruciating than its worst imaginings. It would simply not be final:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

The Bible in general (Isaiah and Jeremiah in particular) is capable of seeing in pagan princes the unwitting servants of YHWH. Because he is no mere tribal deity, he is able to summon and to dismiss a generation’s ruling powers as easily as he sends, say, an Israelite prophet to rebuke and dismantle one of Jerusalem’s little kings.

In the Yahwistic economy, size does not matter.

Such solid, cosmic architecture does not in the end mitigate Jeremiah’s grief.

It simply makes it possible to imagine life in Babylon as something other than a net catastrophe.

Babylons ever since have proven so to those who will stoop low enough to the ground to share Jeremiah’s angle of view.