Scripture Daily

Context No. 17 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 11:14-23: in context

14“Therefore don’t pray for this people. Don’t lift up cry or prayer for them; for I will not hear them in the time that they cry to me because of their trouble. 15What has my beloved to do in my house, since she has behaved lewdly with many, and the holy flesh has passed from you? When you do evil, then you rejoice.” 16The LORD called your name, “A green olive tree, beautiful with goodly fruit.” With the noise of a great roar he has kindled fire on it, and its branches are broken. 17For the LORD of Armies, who planted you, has pronounced evil against you, because of the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done to themselves in provoking me to anger by offering incense to Baal. 18The LORD gave me knowledge of it, and I knew it. Then you showed me their doings. 19But I was like a gentle lamb that is led to the slaughter. I didn’t know that they had devised plans against me, saying, “Let’s destroy the tree with its fruit, and let’s cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered.” 20But, LORD of Armies, who judges righteously, who tests the heart and the mind, I will see your vengeance on them; for to you I have revealed my cause. 21“Therefore the LORD says concerning the men of Anathoth, who seek your life, saying, ‘You shall not prophesy in the LORD’s name, that you not die by our hand’— 22therefore the LORD of Armies says, ‘Behold, I will punish them. The young men will die by the sword. Their sons and their daughters will die by famine. 23There will be no remnant to them, for I will bring evil on the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation.’”

Jeremiah prophesied in Jerusalem's last decades, warning that the nation's idolatry would bring Babylon down on it. The book keeps not only his public oracles but his private anguish, a set of passages often called his confessions, where he argues with God about what the work is costing him. This passage falls inside the first of them. God has just told Jeremiah to stop praying for the people, since the judgment is fixed. Then Jeremiah learns something closer to home.

The men of his own town are plotting to kill him. Jeremiah was a priest from Anathoth, a small priestly village a few miles northeast of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 1:1), the same place where Solomon had once banished the priest Abiathar (1 Kings 2:26). His neighbors and kin want him dead for prophesying. Cut off the tree with its fruit, they say, so his name is remembered no more. Jeremiah says he had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter, not knowing they had schemed against him, and he hands the whole matter to God, asking to see justice done.

The attack Jeremiah never saw coming was not from the king or the foreign priests but from the people he grew up with. The hardest resistance to a true thing often comes from home. Whose disapproval, close to me, am I most afraid of, and is it keeping me from something I know is right?

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