Wednesday, April 1, 2020 Reflection from Rev. Jerry Eve
Psalm 143; Jeremiah 32:1-9, 36-41; Matthew 22:23-33
The passage that jumps out at me most today – and do please read all three, but – it’s Jeremiah 32; and while the recommendation is for a ‘split shift’, I myself found it helpful to read the intervening verses, 10-35. I remember hearing the great American Baptist sociologist, preacher and writer address a large crowd in the open air one summer and he made great play of the difficulty of saying Anathoth without spraying people with saliva – which would certainly not be good for us to do just now.
It’s a remarkable story, I think. Jeremiah is absolutely convinced that the city is going to be taken by the Babylonian army, who are laying siege to its walls. And he’s annoyed Judah’s king, Zedekiah, so much so by telling everybody what God says is going to happen, that Zedekiah’s locked him up. He knows that Zedekiah has angered Nebuchadnezzar II so much so by entering into an alliance with Egypt and rebelling against him, that Nebuchadnezzar will show the Jerusalemites no mercy. In fact, Zedekiah is blinded by the Babylonians when the city is eventually taken.
And yet Jeremiah does this most amazing thing. He gets the opportunity to buy a field in his home town of Anathoth, which he knows will soon be laid waste, and uninhabitable within his lifetime (Anathoth is thought to have been about 4 km north east of the Old City – today the site is almost surrounded by the separation barrier); and he takes it. Why?
There are a couple of theories. And one is that this passage, which is cited in Matthew’s Gospel as such, is prophetic of that Potter’s Field or Field of Blood that is bought with the thirty pieces of silver returned by Judas Iscariot. It seems to me, though, that Matthew has made a small mistake and is quoting from a passage in Zechariah instead. Akeldama at the southern boundary of the Old City where there’s a monastery these days, with its red clay, seems a far more likely site for that field bought by the chief priests and the elders as a place to bury foreigners.
My own preference being that in the very futility of what Jeremiah did – people would have been quite aghast that he would seem to ‘waste’ his money like that – this was a quite different sort of prophecy. And that what Jeremiah was doing, in the midst of a disaster, was to provide people with hope by saying to them: Yes, we are all going to lose pretty much everything in the coming storm, but one day it’ll all be over, and then we can return and rebuild our lives; we’ll be given a new chance to this time live more godly lives.
Let us pray:
God,
Tony Campolo calls himself a
Red Letter Christian.
He takes as his inspiration for this
from those Bibles that,
printed mainly in black ink,
reserve the colour red
for the words of Christ himself – Your Words.
For Tony, and it should be for us all as Christians,
it’s what Jesus says that really matters.
So help us,
as with a stop sign – to spot danger and avert it,
as in a flame – to have zeal for our faith, and
as in our hearts – to love You,
Amen.