Advent is this time of the year when we read from several books of prophets. The readings may seem a bit random with the choice of texts and authors our lectionary operates. What these readings have in common though, and the reason why these passages have been selected, is that they all point to the coming of Christ – or at least this is the way we understand these passages as Christians. They are certainly read differently in the Jewish tradition
The passage we have today from Jeremiah is actually very typical of the way we as Christians often read the prophecies. We have a very short extract (3 verses) of a book that actually contains 52 chapters. In these verses, Jeremiah declares that God “will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem lives in safety”. As I mentioned last week when we read from Daniel about the “Son of Man”, as soon as we hear these kind of references we are tempted to “jump” immediately to Jesus and say: “See, centuries in advance, the prophets announced Jesus” “the Son of Man” or the “Son of David”, our “king of righteousness”, our “Savior” – and then we are done with the reading. We look in the Bible for confirmation of something we already know and we close the book because there is nothing more the Hebrew Scriptures have to teach us because we have found the answer with Jesus.
The problem though with our Christian understanding of the Old Testament in general, and of the prophecies more specifically, is that if we approach these texts only as “predictions about Jesus”, we take the risk to make of the Old Testament a book of divination (and divination that’s actually the way we often understand what a prophet does on a very basic level: the prophet is the one who sees the future). This is a dangerous and deceptive way of reading the Bible. First of all, it’s dangerous because it may lead some readers to try to use the texts to predict and control the future and even the end of the world, and we certainly know that many cults did just that when interpreting the Bible. But more often, without going that far, the problem with this type of reading is that it is deceptive: seeing only the “prediction” can make us miss the historical, ethical and spiritual meaning of the text. Interestingly, reading the Bible, and especially the prophecies, as a foretelling of the future is actually counter Biblical: there are many passages in the Bible that condemn astrology, divination and all the ways we try to manipulate our reality using a perverted form of religiosity.
So the question for us during this time of Advent could be: How – as Christians – are we supposed to read the prophets right and what can we learn from them? Well, I am not sure I have the correct answer, but there are maybe a few things we can talk about. Luther used to say that the Old testament was “the cradle of Christ”. I don’t think he meant by that that we should “read between the lines”, find hidden references to Christ in the Bible, rather Luther meant that the Old testament relates the history, the cultural context from where Jesus comes from and he probably meant also that we find in the Old Testament a growing sense of who God is, the God who Jesus called his Father.
And so back to our lesson for today – My sense is that there is much more to learn in Jeremiah than a simple prediction of a few verses. I am not convinced that Jeremiah was gifted with a sixth sense, or even had a revelation from above about what would happen in his land several centuries later. More important I think is that Jeremiah, as a prophet, shows us what it is to be a bearer of God’s word ( which is the Greek etymology of the word pro- phet. As a consequence, in Jeremiah’s way of living / of bearing the word, we are given clues to recognize the ultimate “bearer of the word” when he would come (“bearer of the word” / “the word himself” is the name John gives to Jesus in the prologue of his Gospel).
So what clues are we given?
– Well, the first thing we notice about Jeremiah is that he spoke the truth to power – specifically he told the king of Judah things he didn’t want to hear – that Babylon would prevail over Jerusalem and that he would lose his kingdom. We see in the Gospel today that it is exactly what Jesus does as well, as he predicts the second fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. They both teach that real power is to be found in God and not in human institutions.
– In the meantime, Jeremiah had words of comfort for those who were afflicted and enduring the oppression of the foreign powers and a corrupted king. The passage we have today is actually taken from what we call “The book of consolation” (chapters 30-33 inside the book of Jeremiah). In the same way, Jesus promised a reversal of situation to all who were oppressed (“the first will be the last”) and was systematically on the side of the powerless (sinners, foreigners, women and children)
– Jeremiah, as Jesus, loved the poor and lived in poverty as a way to proclaim that the true riches were to be found in God. They didn’t seek profit from their prophetic activity – quite the opposite, they didn’t receive prestige and wealth because their teaching was displeasing to many.
– Jeremiah suffered for the truth: He was imprisoned, mocked, starved and almost put to death – this of course reminds us of the sufferings of Christ who remained faithful to his mission to the end.
– Jeremiah died in exile and Jesus died being rejected.
– In the midst of the “gloom and doom”, Jeremiah and Jesus both encouraged the people to “watch expectantly” for God’s justice – as is very obvious in our Gospel today. Jesus says: “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near”
There are for me two main lessons we can take away from that:
1 – A prophet embodies holiness. True prophets don’t just proclaim the message – they are the message, at their level, in their own circumstances, according to their own strengths (and weaknesses). If we believe that the prophets of the Old Testament announced Christ, we have to see that it was not only with their words that they did the announcement. They worked actively for the righteousness and the justice of the kingdom. As we read from the books of the prophets, we are invited to do those things as well: To put God first, even against our interests, to stand up against injustices (sometimes the ones done to us, and mainly, the ones done to others). We are invited to comfort the afflicted, to encourage the little ones, to help the poor, to find God’s presence in the midst of our personal sufferings and in the difficulties of our times. And above all that, we are invited to find hope and to bring hope.
2 – And I would like to conclude by saying a few words about hope as we can come to understand it in our readings. Hope as you know is generally the umbrella theme in Advent. Yet we often misunderstand hope as a religious form of optimism. We see though that hope isn’t cheap in the Bible. As we discover in Jeremiah and in our Gospel today, hope is the sense of God’s presence in a broken and suffering world, in the doom and the gloom. Jeremiah like Jesus do not sugarcoat it. Yet Jeremiah tells the people that in spite of all, God will fulfill his promises. Jesus invites his disciples to stand up. Hope does not come when we sit and tell ourselves that things will get better eventually (or even in a more spiritual way: “This too shall pass”). In Jeremiah, hope springs from righteousness, from holiness, embodied in God’s people. It is from people with a prophet’s awareness and behavior that God will bring healing and restoration to the world. This was foreseen in Jeremiah and will find for us clear revelation in Christ. But this is also an invitation for all of us. We too will be prophets and announce Christ if we embody this way of living.