Canter Bridge

We desperately want good news. In time of distress, our minds scan their half-remembered data for a word of hope. As we need food and water, we sense that there must be a happy description of what is happening under our feet that will declare things not be as bad as they appear. Salvation is just around the corner. It must be so.

In Jeremiah’s day, prophetic voices of easy hope abounded. The canonical text calls them false. In the literature that comes to us bearing Jeremiah’s name, YHWH’s verdict upon such happy criers is almost violent for its brevity: ‘I did not send them’.

Instead, Jeremiah declares that YHWH’s future accompanies those who have been sent off to exile and—more precisely— with those among that bereft community who will make Babylon their home.

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 redemption of Israel, it turns out, does not lie around the next bend in the road. To the contrary, it will come to those who hunker down for a multi-generational life lived out at the center of the period’s Evil Empire.

Since Babylon has become the hired razor that will in YHWH’s hand shame Judah—to quote another prophet—then Judah must perform the odd discipline of learning to contribute to Babylon, to pray for that alien city, to turn it into home.

Their children will speak its language. Their grand-children will speak it as their first.

Redemption is slow and, so, a people must put itself at risk in an existential circumstance that they hoped would sting just for a moment.

It will not.

Yet two things will occur as they plant and hoe their vineyards on Babylonian soil, from from the familiar hills where the songs of Zion rise easy to the lips of sunburnt farmers tilling promised land: YHWH will bless. YHWH will (but only one day and we may not live to see it) come to rescue.

Redemption is on a slow cooker.

‘Time to buy hoes.