Scripture Daily

Context No. 350 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 2:33-37: in context

33How well you prepare your way to seek love! Therefore you have even taught the wicked women your ways. 34Also the blood of the souls of the innocent poor is found in your skirts. You didn’t find them breaking in, but it is because of all these things. 35“Yet you said, ‘I am innocent. Surely his anger has turned away from me.’ “Behold, I will judge you, because you say, ‘I have not sinned.’ 36Why do you go about so much to change your ways? You will be ashamed of Egypt also, as you were ashamed of Assyria. 37You will also leave that place with your hands on your head; for the LORD has rejected those in whom you trust, and you won’t prosper with them.

Jeremiah is delivering a hard indictment of Judah, and the charges are specific and ugly. She has become an expert at chasing lovers, he says, meaning her frantic pursuit of foreign alliances and foreign gods, and, more damning, the blood of the innocent poor is found on the hem of her clothes. The guilt is not hidden or ambiguous; it is stained into her garments where anyone could see it. And yet, in the middle of all this, Judah says something astonishing: I am innocent. Surely God's anger has turned away from me. I have not sinned.

God's response points to exactly that denial as the problem. Behold, I will judge you, he says, because you say, I have not sinned. It is a striking thing to say. The judgment is coming not simply because of the sin but because of the insistence that there is no sin. Denial is the one posture that makes repair impossible, because you cannot be forgiven of something you refuse to admit doing. And notice the other symptom Jeremiah names: why do you go about so much, changing your ways, running from Egypt to Assyria and back, shopping for security from one foreign power after another, only to be shamed by each in turn? The denial and the frantic search go together. Someone who will not admit the real problem keeps looking for a fix in all the wrong places.

The uncomfortable mirror here is the phrase I have not sinned, spoken with blood on the hem. Where do I insist I have done nothing wrong while the evidence sits plainly on my own clothes, and where has that insistence, more than the wrong itself, become the thing that keeps me stuck?

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