Jeremiah and Jesus

Jeremiah 26:1-27:22
2 Thessalonians 3:1-18
Psalm 85:1-13
Proverbs 25:16


Jeremiah 26 makes for strange reading as a Christian.  There are so many parallels between what Jeremiah and Uriah went through at the hands of the Israeli leadership and what Jesus and John the Baptist went through.


Both Jesus and Jeremiah are brought before the elders on a charge of saying that the temple will be torn down.  In both cases it is the mob who seem to be dictating the course and direction of justice rather than the principles of God's law.  In both cases a fellow prophet has been judicially murdered by the king - Uriah (how ironic is his name...) and John the Baptist.  The words of the officials in Jeremiah's day echo those of Pilate, "This man does not deserve death."


The big difference between the two comes with the "wise old men" and in particular Ahikam son of Shaphan who decide that Kings come and go but God and his word stays the same.  The were able to recall what had happened in the time of Hezekiah when Micah prophesied in the way that Jeremiah had done and the people responded in a completely different way.  


This took real guts.  One of the priests at a recent conference I was at spoke about the church's struggle against governments for the liberation of the poor and politically oppressed and he spoke in a simple and unemotional way about how six of his fellow seminarians from his year in Maynooth had been martyred for standing up to dictatorial regimes on behalf of the people.


I think it was his very calm and measured way of speaking that struck me the most.  "It was the Gospel, it is offensive to people in power, and you could expect to die for it.  That's all, where's the shock in that?" he seemed to say by his demeanour and tone of voice.  Jeremiah faced a kangaroo court over his loyalty to God, Jesus was executed for speaking truth to power just as Uriah and John had been before him.  That Jeremiah went free simply shows that God had plans for him to work another day and to keep bringing the message of God to the people of Judah again and again whether his words would be accepted or violently opposed.