The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
JEREMIAH 1:4-10: Jeremiah was a very young man in a society that did not value young men. Age and wisdom were related in ancient society's like that of Judah in the 7th century before Christ. Who would listen if a young man spoke to them in the name of God?
Jeremiah's lineage was as proud as anyone's in Judah. His father was Hilkiah the priest at Anathoth, a village that is just three miles northeast of Jerusalem. Hilkiah traced his priestly lineage back to Abiathar and Eli (I Kings 2:26-27). That ancestry is important to the ministry of Jeremiah. Abiathar and Eli were priests in Shiloh, 20 miles north of Anathoth, who had presided at the shrine of Shiloh. Not only that, these men lived by and transmitted the traditions about Moses and God's covenant with the people that centered in Shiloh and circulated through the northern tribes of Israel. Through his father Jeremiah had been taught those great traditions from his earliest day. Jeremiah was probably born in the year 627 B.C.
Great things were happening in the days of Jeremiah's childhood. Josiah the king of Judah was breaking away from the power of Assyria, and he started a movement to take all Assyrian symbols of power out of the temple at Jerusalem. During this cleansing of the temple, a scroll was found hidden in it. The scroll was read to the king, who was so struck by it that he wanted it read to the people as well. This reading took place in 622 B.C. Jeremiah was five years old at the time.
This scroll decreed that all worship of the people of Judah was to take place in the temple at Jerusalem. Josiah graciously invited priests from the outlying areas to move to Jerusalem in order to continue performing sacrifices there. Hilkiah moved his family to Jerusalem so that he could carry on his priestly work. Hilkiah, being of the priestly family from Shiloh, took part in the religious reforms that Josiah was carrying out. These reforms were made in the name of a group we call today "The Deuteronomists." This group was intent on reforming all the religious practices of Judah, its sacrifices, its law, the great narratives of its faith. Jeremiah was raised in the shadow of this reforming group.
When he was 12 years old, in 615, Jeremiah attended the second public reading of the law. (I am following the chronology set out by William Holladay in Jeremiah, A Fresh Reading.) This took place in the precincts of the temple. While he was participating in this public ceremony, the call of the Lord came heavy upon him. He described it this way:
4: Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,
5: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
6: Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to
speak, for I am only a youth."
7: But the LORD said to me,
"Do not say, `I am only a youth';
for to all to whom I send you you shall go,
and whatever I command you you shall speak.
8: Be not afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD."
9: Then the LORD put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the
LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.
10: See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant."
As might be expected of a young boy raised with stories of Moses resonating in his life, Jeremiah's call was much like that of Moses.
-- It was the same God who called both, Yahweh, the God of Israel. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
-- God had promised, Deuteronomy 18:18, that "I will raise up a prophet like you, Moses, from among your brethren"; the young man Jeremiah was the prophet whom God was calling to fulfill that vocation.
-- Like Moses, Jeremiah was reluctant to accept the call. "I am too young," he said.
-- In answer God's words from the second part of Deuteronomy 18:18 resounded in Jeremiah's ears: "I will put my words in your mouth," said the Lord.
-- When Israel was in Egypt, Yahweh had called Moses to deliver God's people from slavery. Six centuries later, in another time of danger for God's people, God called Jeremiah to his dangerous ministry. God said to Jeremiah what he had formerly said to Moses: "I am with you to deliver you."
In the moment of this call God gave Jeremiah his job description:
"See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant."
Jeremiah's task was no local matter. God set him "over nations and over kingdoms." The words "to destroy and to overthrow" are interpolations. They come probably from the hand of an editor, one of those Deuteronomists who during the exile in Babylon edited all the writings from Genesis to Second Kings and also worked over prophecies from Amos to Jeremiah. The other two lines of this description are poetry and go back to Jeremiah himself: "to pluck up and to break down, to built and to plant". "Pluck up and plant" are agricultural terms. The farmer has to plant seeds and to pluck up some of the plants that have grown. The carpenter would talk about "breaking down and building up"; those were functions of his trade. Together they describe the vocation of Jeremiah within Judah. His message would deal with the hard things of plucking up and breaking down, especially as he dealt with the siege of Jerusalem by Babylon. After having done this, he would have the opportunity to build and to plant, to recall Judah to its task as the servant of God.
The harsh call that Jeremiah received from God was fulfilled in his life. During his ministry Jeremiah was clapped in stocks overnight. He was forbidden to enter the temple. He was jeered at, cursed, and ostracized by the people of his nation. He was exiled by his king. The citizens of his own town resolved to kill him; even members of his own family were implicated in this plot. Jeremiah ended his life as an exile in Egypt. He died when he was forty years old. No prophet we know was called to a life of more derision and danger than was Jeremiah, the son of a priestly family from Anathoth.
PSALM 71:1-6: This psalm contains a new set of images in order to underscore its affirmations of faith and trust. God is our deliverer (1-2), our rescuer and savior. God is a rock of refuge (3) to whose strength and stability I can return in time of trouble, my strong fortress to protect me from enemies. God is the one upon whom I have leaned from my birth until today (6).
This psalm relates easily to the life and call of Jeremiah. The psalmist feels that his enemies are plotting against him; that they are ready to seize him whom, they say, God has forsaken. He calls upon God to be near him, to hasten to help him.
The words of the psalm reflect the deepest experience of Jeremiah. "Thou, O Lord, art my hope, my trust, O Lord. Upon thee have I leaned from my birth; thou art he who took me from my mother's womb." His trust and his confidence are summed up in the final words of our text: "My praise is continually before you."
FIRST CORINTHIANS 13:1-13: Pagan processionals pushed their way through the pulsing crowds that peopled the marble streets of Ephesus. The theater cut into the side of the hill gleamed in the burning Aegean sun. Almost unnoticed in the crowds of worshipers and onlookers was a small bemused Jew whose face and body language told that he was working on some kind of serious problem. His lips formed the words, "If in tongues of men I speak or of angels, but have not love, I am sounding brass or clanging cymbal . . . ."
It was that word "love" that was exciting Paul's mind. When we think about the Christian faith, that is the word that comes first to our minds. It was not so in the world of the New Testament. A quick study of the word "love" through a thesaurus (a book that contains all the words in the Old and New Testament in alphabetic order) reveals that the word was used infrequently in that time. Mark's Gospel used it only four times. All these usages surrounded the Great Commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy neighbor as thyself." Matthew's Gospel used it ten times, five times in the Sermon on the Mount, four times in connection with the Great Commandment. The early letters of Paul show a similar reluctance to use the word: Galatians used it four times, First Thessalonians only eight times.
There is one exception to this in the Gospels. The Gospel of John uses the word "love" seventeen times in chapters thirteen through seventeen. This is John's presentation of the meaning of love: "Love one another as I have loved you, . . . greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. . . . I love you, abide in my love." The First Letter of John, a sister publication to the gospel, used the word even more, 35 times, and it gives us the great definitions of love: "God is love, . . . This is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent his son that we might live through him, . . . . Beloved, let us love one another." It was the community of the Gospel of John, centered around Ephesus, who described the meaning of the Christian faith by using the word "love."
Paul was in Ephesus when he wrote his first letter to the church at Corinth. Here for the first time he saw how "love" and "Christ" were intimately related to each other. He saw also that introducing this concept to the struggling, fighting congregations in Corinth might help them to reconcile with one another. He determined to state this idea as powerfully as he could in a key section of his letter. He tried out many ways of presenting the idea, most of them coming directly out of his own experience in Ephesus.
He thought of the processions of pagan priests of Dionysus or of Cybele prancing through the streets of Ephesus, clanging their cymbals to call attention to their gods. He was reminded of something he had seen in the theater of Ephesus. This huge theater, seating 25,000 people, had an acoustical problem: how could the voice of the actor be heard in the far reaches of the theater? Architects came up with a series of brass vases, cut in two, tuned to the sound of the human voice, set in strategic spots around the edges of the theater. These brass vases amplified the human voice; they enhanced the quality of the actors' articulations. He heard the proverbial phrase "to uproot, to tear out mountains,"and he used it in his poem to mean "to make what seems impossible possible." He heard of a Christian who allowed himself to be sold into slavery in order to gain funds for the release of poor fellow-believers, and he said, "If I give away all that I have, but have not love". . . .
Out of his own experiences and in his own mind, Paul fashioned the first part of his treatise on love: "13:1 If in tongues of men I speak or of the angels, and love I do not have, I have become ringing brass or sounding cymbal. 2 And if I myself have prophecy and I know all the mysteries and all the knowledges, and I myself have all the faith so that I uproot mountains, and love I do not have, I am nothing. 3 And if I shall use all I have to feed others, and if I give my body so that I shall be burned, and love I do not have, I gain nothing." Love is essential to the Christian faith.
Love is also practical, and Paul searched his own experience for this practicality. He came up with a word used by Stoic philosophers, found nowhere else in Paul but apt in this letter: "does not parade around." He used the word "long-tempered" to explain love, a way of life not subject to sudden outbursts of anger and rage. He said love does not "behave in unseemly ways," as a man would do who provoked a girl's passion and refused to marry her. "Love does not insist on its own way"; this has to do with sharpening a stick and prodding someone with it. Love is "slow to expose," reluctant to drag a scandal into the light of day, disposed to cover up ugly business rather than expose it by talking of it in public. 4 Love is long-tempered, merciful the love, not seeking, does not parade around, is not inflated, 5 is not ashamed, does not seek the things of itself, does not arouse to anger, does not consider the evil, 6 does not rejoice over the unjust, but joins in rejoicing in the truth; 7 all things love is slow to expose, all things believes, all things hopes, all things endures.
The last part of the treatise draws a contrast between the transient and incomplete present and the permanent and fulfilled future. 8 Love never falls, he says, and the image may have three different foci. It could speak of leaves falling from a tree: love does not come to a summer's end with the necessity of facing a bleak winter; it is always fresh, green, and sheltering.
It could be winds dying down and leaving a ship in the doldrums: the divine love never ceases to blow across the oceans of life to keep the ships on their voyages. It could refer to hissing an actor off the stage: love never puts on a bad act, never plays the villain; it always plays the heroic part and always plays it well. He introduces other contrasts, ones like prophecies, tongues, knowledge that were important to the Corinthians: But if prophecies, they shall be ineffective; if tongues, they shall stop; if knowledge, it shall be ineffective. 9 For from parts we know and from parts we prophecy; 10 but when comes the complete, that from parts is ineffective.
11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; but when I have become a man, rendered ineffective are the things of the child. 12 For I see yet through a mirror indistinctly, but then face to face; yet I know from parts but then I shall know just as I have also been known. Here Paul was referring to experiences all Corinthians and Ephesians had had. They knew the difference between a child and the grown person and how maturity overcame childhood. They knew about mirrors, made of metal without the perfection of contemporary glass. They knew that the image in a mirror was distorted. They knew that some people claimed to see the image of their god in their mirrors. But then face to face. When Christ comes, we receive a gift denied to Moses and to all the people of the Old Testament: we see God face to face.
Paul is ready now for the grand climax to this sermon: He had come close to this idea once before, in his First Letter to the Thessalonians. There he had written, "Your work of faith, your labor of love, and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." In Corinthians the words came out, 13 "And now remain faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these the love."
There is no one way to describe these great words, so I will simply refer to what others have said about them. Reinhold Niebuhr (Irony of American History, 63) meditated upon the phrase and wrote, "Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in the immediate context of history; we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; we must be saved by love. Nothing we do is as virtuous from the viewpoint of others as it is from our standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness." Centuries before Martin Luther had said (Romans 152): "One offends God by the reverse of these virtues: hatred, faithless, despair." Paul Minear reminds us that faith and hope and love are not merely virtues. They are gifts from God given to us through Jesus Christ. "God's faithfulness elicits our faith, God's promise elicits our hope, God's love constrains a responding love." Paul had heard the word "love" spoken of in the congregations of Ephesus. He tried to speak of his own experience with the word. He succeeded in a way that not even he could imagine.
(There are obviously sources I have drawn upon for this exposition. I have turned to Moffatt's commentary on First Corinthians, to the writing of Paul Minear, to an article in Biblical Archaeological Review on "sounding brass," to various dictionaries for the meaning of words, to Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther. The outline for the article - essential, practical, permanent - comes from the Presbyterian Worship Planner. The idea for the relationship between the writings of John and those of Paul is, as far as I know, my own.)
LUKE 4:21-30: In order to grasp the meaning of this passage, it has to be set in the context of last week's study from Luke. We learned last week that Jesus had derived the outline for his own mission from the prophecy of Isaiah, 61:1-2. Following Isaiah, Jesus intended "to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." His ministry was to be one of both justice and redress in behalf of those most hurt by his society, the poor, the captives and the blind, and the oppressed whether Jew or Gentile.
The problem in the story lies in the usual translation of verse 22: "And all spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth; and they said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?'" This translation gives quite the wrong idea. The Greek does not mean "words of charm, gracious words." It means "words of God's mercy." In other words, the people in the synagogue were astonished that Jesus spoke of the mercy of God.
Jesus had done precisely that. He had actually left out part of the text of Isaiah. Isaiah had closed by saying, "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and a day of vengeance for our God." Jesus had omitted the vengeance! He had stopped with mercy! Not only stopped there; Jesus also went on to point to times when God's mercy was extended to gentiles at the expense of the Jews: Elijah showed God's mercy to a foreign woman from Sidon and not to Jewish people! Elisha was merciful in God's name to a Syrian and not to the Israelites. The people were enraged. By what right did Jesus say these things? He was only a carpenter's son, he was not a trained rabbi. How dare he speak this way? So they moved to throw him over the hilltop. Only the calm and poise of Jesus saved him on that day.