Scripture Daily

Context No. 38 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 3:1-5: in context

1“They say, ‘If a man puts away his wife, and she goes from him, and becomes another man’s, should he return to her again?’ Wouldn’t that land be greatly polluted? But you have played the prostitute with many lovers; yet return again to me,” says the LORD. 2“Lift up your eyes to the bare heights, and see! Where have you not been lain with? You have sat waiting for them by the road, as an Arabian in the wilderness. You have polluted the land with your prostitution and with your wickedness. 3Therefore the showers have been withheld and there has been no latter rain; yet you have had a prostitute’s forehead and you refused to be ashamed. 4Will you not from this time cry to me, ‘My Father, you are the guide of my youth!’? 5“‘Will he retain his anger forever? Will he keep it to the end?’ Behold, you have spoken and have done evil things, and have had your way.”

Jeremiah is arguing with Judah about its worship of other gods, and he reaches for the hardest image he has: a marriage that has broken down. The law said that if a man divorced his wife and she married another man, he could not take her back afterward (Deuteronomy 24:1-4). Everyone listening knew the rule. Jeremiah states it, then says God is prepared to break it.

The accusation is unsparing. You have taken many lovers, he says, look up at the bare hilltops where the shrines stood and name a place you have not been. You waited by the roadside for them like a bandit in the desert. The drought that followed, the withheld spring rains, is named as part of the same story. And still, in the middle of it, the astonishing line: yet return to me. Then the double portrait of a people who talk like children while acting otherwise, calling God my Father, the guide of my youth, and asking whether he will stay angry forever, while going on doing exactly as they please.

The passage refuses to let the language of relationship stand in for the reality of it. Warm words about God, no change in conduct. Where am I using the vocabulary of a relationship I am not actually keeping?

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