Abide: Jeremiah Part I

Joseph Stuart: I remember the first time that someone told me I was offering a Jeremiah ad. I hadn't completed some work that was due and the professor I worked for told me that I didn't need to Jeremiah ad and I could finish the project in the next few days. He wasn't exactly happy about my failure to provide the work that I had promised. But still, he provided a way for me to make sure that I knew that the error wasn't catastrophic. Failure wasn't fatal. There was a way back in some ways. My experience was a lot like the book of Jeremiah, where what had happened wasn't ideal. But there was a promise that I could find myself in good graces again. We'll discuss those feelings of melancholy and hope, faith and acceptance and much more on today's episode of Abide, a Maxwell Institute podcast. My name is Joseph Stuart. I'm the Public Communications Specialist of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Kristian Heal is a Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute. And each week we discussed the week's block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Come, Follow Me curriculum. We aren't here to present a lesson, but rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture block, so as to help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas. Today we are joined by Garrett Maxwell, a research assistant here at the Maxwell Institute. Garrett has done Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic here at BYU. He currently works at the Maxwell Institute conducting research on the history of Early Christianity, as well as a comparative project on the Qu’ran and the Book of Mormon. After graduation, Garrett plans to continue his studies in graduate school. Welcome, Garrett, to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Garrett Maxwell: Thank you for having me on.

Stuart: Of course, we are thrilled to have you here. Kristian, we're going to be spending two weeks on Jeremiah. This one will focus roughly on the first half. What's going on in the book of Jeremiah?

Kristian Heal: Jeremiah is the longest book in the Old Testament other than the Psalms. Jeremiah lived in the last days of the kingdom of Judah, and lived to see his prophecies of its full fulfilled. He was a contemporary of Lehi. So as Latter-day Saints, we read the book of Jeremiah with particular interest. Jeremiah is a witness to a world from which Lehi fled a world on the brink of destruction, and a people soon to be taken into exile. Jeremiah was called in 627 BCE, in the 13th year of the reign of the good King Josiah, and was still active when Jerusalem fell in 587. The history of this period is described in Second Kings 22-25. As we read Jeremiah, we are on the one hand, listening as it were, to the voice of the Prophet, speaking to the people before the exile, while on the other hand, we're reading a book that was written to be read to a people in exile. As John Goldingay reminds us, in the last decades before the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah did not succeed in getting Judah to come to its senses. The question is whether the next generation will learn the lesson, start taking Yahweh as challenges seriously, and claim the hopes the book offers. Each prophet spoke to the people of their own day, warning, pleading and offering hope. But the books that come down to us, the books of the Bible, were written for a later generation and really for later generations, including our own. Interestingly, there were two quite different versions of the book of Jeremiah in antiquity. The version that we have in our Bible and slightly shorter version that is found in the Septuagint, the version of the Bible translated into Greek in the third century before Christ. Hebrew fragments of this shorter version, were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, so that we know that existed in Hebrew to in the broadest terms, Jeremiah can be divided into three sections. Chapters 1-25, give Jeremiah's messages about Israel and his prayers, chapters 26-45 of the stories about Jeremiah and chapters 46-52 give Jeremiah's message about other nations with a historical code are in the final chapter, borrowed from Second Kings 24-25. I'll focus on the content of chapters 1 to 25 this week, and that's what we're going to talk about altogether, and introduce chapters 26 through 52 in the next week's episode. The book of Jeremiah seems to describe its own production. In chapter 36 we're told that in the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, son of Josiah of Judah, the word came to Jeremiah from the Lord, “get a scroll, and write upon it all the words that have spoken to you concerning Israel and Judah and all the nations from the time I first spoke to you in the days of Josiah to this day.” This he did, dictating the words to his scribe, Baruch son of Neriah, the first version of the scroll is destroyed. So Jeremiah got another scroll and gave it to his scribe, Baruch son of Neriah who wrote in it, the whole text of the scroll that King Jehoiakim of Judah had burned and more of the like was added. As John Collins notes, “Many scholars have argued that the substance of this scroll is found in Jeremiah 1-25.” The essence of these first 25 chapters, is captured in a verse from Jeremiah's call in chapter 1, “See, I appoint you this day over nations and kingdoms, to uproot and to pull down, to destroy, and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” In Marvin Sweeney's summary, the basic concerns of the book are the impending punishment of both Israel/Judah and nations, as well as the restoration of both. The theme of warning predominates and escalates. Yet warning is punctuated with beautiful promises of restoration, uprooting and destroying set side by side with building and planting. This is the one eternal round of God's work. To complete the summary: The Lord calls Israel to repent in chapters 2-6, chapter 7-10 describe the Lord's instructions to Jeremiah, pray summoned to be delivered at the temple. Chapters 11-13, are concerned with Israel breaking their covenant with the Lord, therefore risking the eternal covenant with God to maintain the house and Kingship of the Davidic line. In the next chapters, Jeremiah uses several images to teach Israel about God's nature and plans, including the symbols of drought and marriage, and the potter and the shattered pot. The section ends with a series of oracles against the last kings of Israel and against false prophets. Included in this section are prophecies of the rise of a future righteous Davidic King.

Joseph Stuart: Garrett, something that has always intrigued me about the book of Jeremiah is thinking about the way that the temple plays into the book, because the temple is so central to ancient Israelites and to their religion. How does the temple factor into the book of Jeremiah?

Maxwell: So for that, we'll turn to Jeremiah chapter seven, in what is known as the “Temple Sermon”. And it's a striking one as we'll see, though, he's instructed to stand in the gate of the temple to deliver the sermon and the message is a scathing one. Imagine the picture for a moment, there stands a profit on the steps of your local LDS temple and as people walk inside, he tells them to “amend their ways”, and “enumerates the host of their misdeeds”, along with the warning that inaction will inevitably lead to destruction. Rather striking isn't it? Is not temple going among the best of activities? Is that not a sign of deep commitment and devotion? What the sermon is taking aim at is those among the temple goers that viewed the existence of the temple as a sort of lucky charm. Or as Robert Altar in his commentary puts it a “Fetishistic notion of the intrinsic efficacy of the temple.” In other words, those that did not live the ethical mode of life outside the temple walls, yet still clung to the idea that the mere existence of the temple ensured salvation, the temple had become their idol. And this is relevant to Latter-day Saint audiences as an ever timely reminder that though temples are being erected at record pace, and we indeed should feel proud of this fact. And though we may be a template going people, again, something to be proud of, there forever lurks the danger of Temple going, becoming a substitute for the day to day ethical labor that constitutes the life of a disciple of Christ. I don't know anybody that thinks that way, at least not consciously. But this prophetic reminder is helpful regardless, if only for its value in reinvigorating the silent conversation that takes place between our ritual worship, and what I call our “existential worship”. And what I mean by that is the way in which we dispose ourselves, or the ethical mode in which we live as a form of worship.

Heal: Talk more about this character is I think this is a really kind of interesting point that you're making. And a larger one for me is because we kind of read the Old Testament, because sometimes these stories and experiences sound familiar on the one hand, but also sound sort of so different, especially the Prophet’s warnings against the people against kind of social justice, on the one hand, kind of idolatry on the other. These don't seem like, you know, we're sort of doing our part, but idolatry, particularly this kind of misalignment between our religious life and our sort of ethical life, or our ritual practice and our ethical life. Is this something that we can see, in our own day in our own lives? How do we interpret that into the world in which we live, do you think?

Maxwell: Yeah, I understand what you're saying and that sometimes when reading the Old Testament, the things that the prophets are calling the people up or seem antiquated, right? We no longer have our stone idols or make cake offerings to goddesses of fertility, and the like. But I think that, for example, President Kimball's famous address “The False Gods We Worship” in 1978. He lays out for the modern audience, you know us in our day, the kind of idols that we have, are those things that we set up as idols, like our worship of the nation, state or nuclear weapons or things of that sort. And so idols are about us, no matter who they are that we live in. They take on different forms by But we can never seem to escape idolatry or setting up things before God.

Stuart: I think something that goes along with that is an idea that you found in your research this week, the idea of an “empty ritual”. Could you explain what that means?

Maxwell: Yeah, so the idea of the “empty ritual” means that there's a ritual activity that is taking place that is supposed to be closely coupled with or associated with an ethical way of living. But when that ritual takes place, divorced from that ethical life in the ritual thereby becomes empty, because it no longer has its ethical content that it was supposed to be attached to.

Stuart: This is an interesting point, because I think of myself benefiting from some kinds of empty rituals. So for instance, when I was an undergraduate at BYU, I always brought the same pencil into the testing center. And whenever I could, I always wore the same hoodie. Part of that was the social science behind what you're wearing, and the sensory experiences you're having, reflecting on what's happening while you're learning. But part of it also was just that it helped me to feel secure. Is there a danger in doing things just to feel secure?

Maxwell: No, I don't think so. And there's many forms of ritual, and there's our social rituals, like handshaking, you know, where does that even come from? Why did we start doing it? I don't know. They don't shake hands in other parts of the world, there's different forms of greeting. But where the conversation usually goes at this point is into discussion of empty rituals or “useless rituals”, as you said, and how ritual symbolic action is either entirely meaningless, or at least meaningless without the ethical or emotional act to back it up. Now, we owe the way we talk about the subject today to the Reformation and its anti-ritual worldview. We won't go into that history here, but suffice it to say that for a lot of people for a long time, to be anti-ritual is to be enlightened. Where I’d like to go instead is beyond the critique of ritual, to the critique of the critique of ritual. After all, we are a ritualistic people. To begin with, I think there is something to be said for ritual activity as a home base in a world obsessed with novelty. Ritual is the familiar embrace, the well worn shoes. It can serve to reorient us when everything else is in flux. The pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus even went so far as to say, “life is flux.” Psychologists and prophets alike have long known that without something solid to hold on to without a stable ground to stand on, so to speak. The winds of inconstancy take a toll on the human soul. Our baseline well being seems to suffer without stabilizing forces.

Stuart: So how can we productively think about the rituals that we participate in being infused with divine purpose or divine love?

Maxwell: Yeah, great question. And for that, let's turn to Dr. John D. Levinson, the venerable Jewish scholar of the Hebrew Bible. He has a splendid meditation on the value of ritual in his book called The Love of God: divine gift, human gratitude and mutual faithfulness in Judaism. He says that, “We need to be aware, as well of the shallow talk about empty rituals, to be sure which was going to deed become empty performed habitually and thoughtlessly, without regard to their meaning and the ethic that is supposed to be associated with them. The prophets of Israel were unstinting in their condemnation of just that sort of pro form of religion. But it is also important to remember that like other habitual behaviors, rituals are hearty, like habits, difficult to break, and thus likely to survive the spiritual dry periods when faith and feelings are just not there. The ritual without the theological truth to which it bears witness, the act without the affect can come alive, the empty ritual can be filled up when the dry period passes. Indeed, the very existence of the ritual can help the spiritual dryness pass from the scene. Conversely, when the ritual is no longer observed, the likelihood declines that the message with which it is associated will survive. And the likelihood that old practice will come to be associated with new meanings declines still further.” Dr. Levinson goes on to later say that, “The last temptation or the great treason rather than doing the right deed for the wrong reason, is to give up doing the right deed altogether, and thus dramatically lessen one's chances of arriving at the highest motive for the behavior.”

Heal: The issue then is not an inherent problem with the ritual, or even ritual becoming habitual, as it were, but sort of something else altogether, that there is and I really love this idea of the sort of potent value of ritual that is able to be sort of constantly refunded or reinvested with significance, if we just allow ourselves to sort of continue in its practice, that the ebb and flow of it significance is just sort of part of life. But what is valuable is to sort of maintain that. The concern of Jeremiah is hypocrisy, then, rather than your rituals or become empty as as of a really important, really interesting distinction that you're drawing out.

Maxwell: As the saying goes, “hypocrisy is the homage by space to virtue.” And so spiritual life is full of the troughs and the peaks right? But the ritual is that thing that can always be the constant that the spiritual life can always return to, and I think it's unwise to discard the ritual. You know, it's not expendable, because that doesn't have to fluctuate with our spiritual life and kind of where we're at in relationship to God and our faith. And so there's something to be said for the hardiness, the durability of the ritual, because these rituals that we have, as historians of religion have noted, religions usually carry with them the very oldest parts of a tradition, keep them in memory.

Stuart: I have a friend who grew up Roman Catholic and no longer affiliates with their church. But whenever we enter into a Catholic church still crosses herself with the sign of the cross. So when you talk about that hardiness, it's something that endures, it becomes something of who you are. And I think that George Handley teaches this really well in his book Home Waters. Could you read that quote for us that you've found?

Maxwell: So George Handley writes, “When I have tried to keep my focus, and when I've worked to be there, at the moment of revelation with clean hands in a pure heart, I have dared to believe that what I feel is the merciful love of God, like a flickering candle, hand guarded in the winds of winter, it is a light that is easily extinguished, but because it has always proved capable of reigniting all the repeated rituals of devotion, all the mundane hours of habit seem a small price to keep possibility alive.” And I think what we get in this excerpt is a faithfully balanced account of the relationship between ritual and the thing itself, the love of God, the revelation, whatever it may be, ritual is not itself the end goal, but neither is it expendable.

Stuart: I think that the consistency of ritual is something that's crucial to remember in Jeremiah, because there's so much chaos going on. Maybe one of the dichotomies that we see in the book of Jeremiah are apocalypse, so the destruction of everything, and hope, the idea that we can continue to keep on going.

Heal: Yeah, I think Jeremiah 16, is of the kind of macrocosm of the prophetic activity that we saw already in Isaiah, and that we see now in Jeremiah, and in this few verses, we get both the terror and the joy of prophecy, the work of the prophets is doing something interesting in sort of contrasting these two activities. In this one chapter, we experienced that whiplash that we last felt when we moved from Isaiah 39-40. Jeremiah predicts such a bleak future for Israel, and God commands Jeremiah to take three symbolic actions that point to God's judgment about Israel. Jeremiah is commanded not to marry and have children, do not attend funerals or lament the dead, and to not participate in any celebratory feast, these symbolic actions foretell a terrible and calamitous destruction. The command to not have children in the face of apocalyptic events is important to dwell on for a moment, I think. This command is given to Jeremiah out of mercy, because of what is going to happen to most of the children born at this time. “For thus saith the Lord”, in Jeremiah 16:3-4 “concerning any sons and daughters that may be born in this place, and concerning the mothers who bear them, and concerning the fathers who beget them in this land, they shall die gruesome deaths, they shall not be lamented or buried. They should be like dung on the face of the ground, they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine, and their corpses shall be food for the birds of the sky, and beasts of the earth.” This is the terror of prophecy. Interestingly, this is a terror many feel as they look around at the state of the day, I think. Climate change, pandemics, wars, economic uncertainty, relentless consumption, exploitation, mass migration of refugees, the growing concentration of wealth among the few, and the tyranny of poverty seem to be filling the world of the future with calamitous foreboding. So what are the rising generation to do? Surely the only response and the only responsible response is to not bring children into a world that seems to be dying.

Stuart: This is something that I think about, especially recently, as we had a son, have a son that arrived to us during the pandemic, and thinking about how bleak things have been, really, for the past two years, to be sure, there have been moments of joy, moments of beauty, but in all the chaos that goes on in the world around us. Now, we record these episodes, several weeks, if not months in advance, and I am confident, and it brings me no joy to have this confidence, that whenever this episode is released, there'll be something terrible that has just happened and entered the new cycle to which we will be responding to. And as I held my son yesterday, I thought about the great hope that comes in having children. Now I'm in no way advocating for anyone to think that they need to have children or that anyone can tell them when or how many children to have. But for my wife and I, holding that baby in our arms, as we talked about the terrible things going on in the world around us today, it returned to me that children have the ultimate symbol of hope, their lives that have not yet been lived, they can truly be anything that they choose to be. My oldest is 7 and she goes from wanting to be a princess to wanting to be a mythical snake that is 50 feet long. And while I think that she will change the world, for the better, probably not as a pretend 50 foot snake, it is a reminder that the hope of a life unlived is not just for children, but it's for all of us, the possibility is always there to do good and to be good.

Maxwell: I have to agree with that. My wife and I, we just brought home our first child from the hospital just last week. And I often wonder about the same question, you know, what are we bringing this boy into? And what kind of world will he grow up in? And I think, like you said, children are the ultimate gesture of hope, and to stop having children is what seemed to me a great signal of defeat on the part of the human race. Because why do we bring children to the world, you know, it's not with the hope to, you know, intentionally ruin them, it's to try to shape them into vessels of honor, you know, like, we ourselves are the potter trying to shape them into something better than we have been. The act of bringing children into the world is a defiance, the apocalyptic gloom that seems to hang over us at all times. And I have great hope for my son and taking part in that changing of the world for the better.

Stuart: Holding a baby is maybe the ultimate counterpoint to nihilism, in my experience.

Heal: Yeah, that's lovely. I think that these are exactly the kinds of feelings of hope that well up within us and sort of children help those feelings of hope that well up within us, even in the face of the unspeakable atrocities that we so often see around us. Fortunately, Jeremiah was not simply a prophet of the Apocalypse, not simply a prophet of this impending doom, but offered, I think, some sense of hope. The great hope that he laid out for the people of Israel is that in the future, there will be a new exodus. Yes, Jerusalem may be destroyed, yes, the temple may be destroyed, yes, you may be gone into exile, having lost everything, but you will still maintain your integrity as a people. And in the future, there'll be this new exodus, this new moment in which God reaches out and brings his children back to the promised land. And in fact, it goes so far as to describe kind of hunting out the individuals that this will be a sort of a comprehensive and a thorough exodus. And it will be so great and marvelous that people will talk about that new exodus, instead of the great and miraculous exodus described in the book of Exodus. And I think that when President Nelson talks about the work of gathering Israel, I think of this new exodus. And one of the interesting things we learned, as we looked at the book of Exodus, is that this exodus was seen as a new creation. The exodus isn't just a return of a beleaguered and sort of fallen group back to a shattered land. It's this hope of a new creation, that something new is being built and that somehow, there's this intimate connection between gathering and renewal. I like how the articles of faith, the 10th article of faith links, the gathering of Israel, directly to the renewal of the earth. And when Joseph Smith describes these four great works of the future, he describes the gathering of Israel, the building of Zion, the establishment of a theocracy, and the healing and renewal of the earth. These seem to be the four great tasks of Latter-day Saints. So instead of filling the Earth with the remains of our idolatrous abominations, as it were, the great work of the current and future generations, the hope that we have is that gold people are bringing about and working together to renew the earth.

Stuart: And that brings to mind the image of the potter's wheel, the idea that's introduced in Jeremiah 18. Could you tell us about the parable and the value that you see in understanding it?

Heal: So, God commanded Jeremiah, and said to him, go down to the house of a potter and Jeremiah did, and he found in working at his wheel, and if the vessel he was making was spoiled, it says Jeremiah 18:3-4 as happens to clay in the potter's hands, he would make it into another vessel, such as the potter saw fit to make. So what we're seeing here is a wonderful sort of parable that challenges our notions of inevitability, I think. Challenge our notions of the set future that things will only be a certain way. Only the past is inevitable. And only as the past. When the past was still the future, even the present things could have turned out differently. This is the message that God seems to be teaching in this parable of the potter's wheel. And God seems to be deliberately using a craftsman, a creator. And the work that he's describing is the nature of creators. If the creation doesn't please you, then you start again. There's nothing that cannot be fixed or replaced or rebuilt or remade. My dad works as a builder in rural Suffolk, and I visited him on a building site and found that you had half of an old timber framed farm has lifted off the ground while he was replacing its foundations. And this is something we've all seen in the renewal of the Salt Lake Temple. Creators, builders, artists are not afraid of mistakes, not afraid of things breaking, they know that they can always change their mind and start again, they can always fix the thing that is broken. So it's important to remember that our God is first revealed to us in the Old Testament as the creator. So this metaphor is apt I think, on many levels, we need to think of that creative aspect of God when we hear him say this in Jeremiah 18:7-10: “At one moment, I made decree that a nation or a kingdom shall be uprooted and pulled down and destroyed. But if that nation against which I made the decree turns back from its wickedness, I changed my mind concerning the punishment I plan to bring on it. At another moment I made decree that a nation or a kingdom shall be built and planted, that if it does what is displeasing to me, and does not obey me that I changed my mind concerning the good I plan to bestow upon it.”

Stuart: Yeah, that creativity, the possibility that something else can come from a moment of failure. If the potter creates a bowl or a vase that doesn't work, he simply refashions it into something that does. And it recalls something that Joseph Smith said, where he said, “Let me be resurrected with the saints, whether I ascend to heaven or descend to hell or go to any other place. And if we do go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it. The eternal possibility that things can be better than they are right now.”

Heal: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Maxwell: Yeah. And I think it's important to note the the metaphors that that God is choosing here, he's talking about himself in these terms, right, he's chosen the metaphor of the potter for himself. This tells us the idea he has in mind coming into this project of salvation. And that's to shape us. And just to step out of the Judeo Christian Islamic worldview for a minute, you know, in the history of world religions, it's not exactly a given that the Creator God has this purpose, to shape his creation, and has their long term well-being in mind. There are plenty of other gods in this world that have completely different ideas, none of them involving a cultivation of our souls. And so I think, in the big picture, we also need to appreciate what's going on in the Bible here is this God is beginning to reveal theirself as one that is different than the ones that have come before in his long term aims.

Heal: Yeah, I think that's really important to kind of get at the fundamental nature of God. Didn’t Joseph Smith say the first principle of revealed religion is to understand the character of God. And so we're constantly looking at the scriptures to say, what is God like, what does he want to do with us? And clearly the intentions of even all of these prophetic warnings these dire and terrifyingly crafted warnings are intended to get the people to turn back. And this is, the great tragedy of Jeremiah is that this is the sort of last moment, we’ll see it in Jeremiah, we’ll see it in Ezekiel, this last moment, before this sort of destruction that was so catastrophic, so difficult for the children of Israel that ended what seemed to be eternal promises, ended the existence of Jerusalem as an independent city, as a capital of a kingdom, tore down the temple, things were never quite the same things were never quite as glorious things were never quite as wonderful until this sort of promised return comes about and so God is doing this, but this whole work is intended to sort of remake to create something beautiful, something wonderful, something that lasts and the process isn't one of eternal entropy, where things are kind of falling apart and getting worse. But God is constantly bringing clay back together and starting again and making this new thing, making something beautiful. It reminds me of Psalm 1: God is a maker and a planter and if he will let us He will make us into something glorious. As he will plant us beside a stream of water, and we will yield fruit in our season, and our foliage will always thrive, and we will always prosper.

Stuart: Be someone’s reason for hope. Have a blessed week. Thank you for listening to Abide, a Maxwell Institute podcast.Could you please rate review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast and follow us on social media @BYUMaxwell on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu/edu.Thank you and have a great week.