Brian Zahnd—Year A Christmas 2

Anthony: All right, let’s do this. Let’s dive into the lectionary text we’ll be discussing. Our first pericope of the month is Jeremiah 37:7–14. I’ll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, the updated edition. It’s a Revised Common Lectionary passage for the second Sunday after Christmas Day, January 4.

⁷ Thus says the LORD, God of Israel: This is what you shall say to the king of Judah, who sent you to me to inquire of me: Pharaoh’s army, which set out to help you, is going to return to its own land, to Egypt. ⁸ And the Chaldeans shall return and fight against this city; they shall take it and burn it with fire. ⁹ Thus says the LORD: Do not deceive yourselves, saying, “The Chaldeans will surely go away from us,” for they will not go away. ¹⁰ Even if you defeated the whole army of Chaldeans who are fighting against you and there remained of them only wounded men in their tents, they would rise up and burn this city with fire. ¹¹ Now when the Chaldean army had withdrawn from Jerusalem at the approach of Pharaoh’s army, ¹² Jeremiah set out from Jerusalem to go to the land of Benjamin to receive his share of property among the people there. ¹³ When he reached the Benjamin Gate, a sentinel there named Irijah son of Shelemiah son of Hananiah

And I — why don’t we name people this anymore?

Brian: Just say it with confidence, Anthony.

Anthony: I tried to. I tried to.

[They] arrested the prophet Jeremiah saying, “You are deserting to the Chaldeans.” ¹⁴ And Jeremiah said, “That is a lie; I am not deserting to the Chaldeans.” But Irijah would not listen to him and arrested Jeremiah and brought him to the officials.

Now Brian, I listened to your last sermon Sunday. And you rightly said, when we come to the Hebrew scriptures, we’re looking for the Christ, for the Messiah. This is a doozy. Help us find Christ. And if you were preaching this text to your congregation, what would be the focus of that Christocentric message?

Brian: Yeah, it’s not hard at all. Jeremiah, his whole life, so prefigures Christ. So, Jeremiah is prophesying there in the sixth century BC. We’re headed toward the great catastrophe, the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. And it’s Jeremiah that is warning the city that the end is coming. He’s the one that first says, you have made my temple into a den of robbers or a den of thieves. Jesus borrows that language when he stages his protest in the temple. But when Jesus is protesting in the temple, we call it cleansing the temple. It really wasn’t that. It was sort of a prophetic protest. And then he’s prophesying the imminent, within 40 years we would say, destruction of Jerusalem. This is exactly what Jeremiah had done, and so Jesus is warning that just because you call yourself the people of God.

Earlier in Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah is kind of mocking them. He says, you say, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. They think that simply by being called Yahweh’s people, that no kind of judgment or evil can befall them. And Jeremiah’s saying, “That’s not true.” And that’s exactly what Jesus was doing.

Jesus was lamenting as he arrives in Jerusalem. And he says, “Oh, that you had known the things for peace.” And he begins then in what we call the Olivet Discourse to prophesy the end. It’s not the end of the world, but it is the end of the age, that is, the end of the temple, the temple age, the temple apparatus, the temple elite. All of that is coming to an end. And the idea that because they are the people of God, that the Romans won’t eventually come and destroy the temple, Jesus says, “No, this is going to happen.” And Jeremiah does the same thing.

So, I would lean into that. The passage ends with Jeremiah being arrested. It’s amazing how many notable figures in the Scriptures end up at some point thrown in jail. And I have not yet been arrested.

Anthony: There’s still time, Brian.

Brian: And I’m, I don’t know, I’m feeling like, you know, I don’t want to go to the judgment seat of Christ and have Jesus say, “Hey, BZ, you never got arrested. You lived in the empire all that time and never got arrested.” I’m kind if joking and kind of serious.

The other thing I would do, though, with Jeremiah, I would certainly emphasize that the whole of his life anticipates the Messiah, in that if you follow the story of his rest then he is thrown into this cistern and he nearly perishes, but then he’s brought up out of it.

And so, even that’s pointing toward resurrection. So, I wouldn’t think it would be very difficult to have a Christocentric emphasis here in Jeremiah 37. Really anywhere in Jeremiah, because Jeremiah’s life prefigures that of Christ. So, that’s how I would deal with it.

[00:15:39] Anthony: No, that’s good. Especially on the second Sunday after Christmas, the focus on the Christ child and the Messiah, the incarnate God-man, entering our world and pitching his tent in our neighborhood, as Eugene Peterson would say.

Brian: Yeah.

Anthony: And in Jeremiah we see the shadow of that that is to come in the person of Jesus.