Scripture Daily

Context No. 400 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 22:1-5: in context

1The LORD said, “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and speak this word there: 2‘Hear the LORD’s word, king of Judah, who sits on David’s throne—you, your servants, and your people who enter in by these gates. 3The LORD says: “Execute justice and righteousness, and deliver him who is robbed out of the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong. Do no violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow. Don’t shed innocent blood in this place. 4For if you do this thing indeed, then kings sitting on David’s throne will enter in by the gates of this house, riding in chariots and on horses—they, their servants, and their people. 5But if you will not hear these words, I swear by myself,” says the LORD, “that this house will become a desolation.”’”

God sends Jeremiah on an errand straight into the corridors of power. Go down to the palace, he tells the prophet, to the house of the king of Judah, and deliver this word. And the word is not about religious ceremony or national grandeur. It is about justice, and specifically about the powerless. Do justice and righteousness, God says to the king. Rescue the one who has been robbed from the hand of his oppressor. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

Notice the three groups God names, because they are the same three the whole Bible keeps returning to: the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, the people in that society with the least power, no standing, no protector, no one obligated to defend them. God makes the treatment of exactly these people the measure of the king's legitimacy, and he attaches the survival of the entire dynasty to it. If you actually do this, he says, kings will keep riding through these gates in glory. But if you will not listen, then, and he swears it by himself, this house will become a ruin. The splendor of the palace, the glory of the throne, none of it counts. What God weighs the whole institution by is whether the people with power use it to protect the people without any.

That is a searching standard, and it scales all the way down. Wherever I hold power, in a family, a workplace, a community, however modest, God's measure of how I am using it is how I treat the ones who have no power over me and cannot repay or resist me. Do I use whatever authority I have to shield the vulnerable, the foreigner and the fatherless and the widow of my own world, or mainly to protect my own comfort and standing, which is the very thing God says will not save the house at all?

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