Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 22

Know that for Thee I have borne reproach From them who despise(704) Thy words. 16 [End them!(705) Thy word's my delight And the joy of my heart For Thy Name has been called upon me, Lord of Hosts!]

I have not sat in their company 17 Jesting and merry.(706) Because of Thy hand alone I sit, For with rage Thou hast filled me.

Why is my pain perpetual, 18 My wound past healing?

Art Thou to be a false stream to me, As waters that fail?

This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!

Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19 If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee, That before Me thou stand; And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile, As My Mouth thou shalt be.

[Then may those turn to thee, But not thou to them.]

For to this people I set thee 20 An impa.s.sable wall.(707) When they fight thee they shall not prevail, With thee am I to deliver,(708) And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21 From the hand of the cruel redeem thee.

Thou(709) shalt not take a wife- XVI. 2 Rede of the Lord- Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine Within this place.

For thus hath the Lord said: 3 As for the sons and the daughters Born in this place, [As for their mothers who bore them And their fathers who gat them Throughout this land.]

Painfullest deaths shall they die 4 Unmourned, unburied, [Be for dung on the face of the ground, Consumed by famine and sword.]

And their corpses shall be for food To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth.(710) Thus saith the Lord: 5 Come not to the house of mourning, Nor go about to lament,(711) Because My Peace I have swept Away from this people.(712) For them shall none lament, 6_b_ Nor gash nor make themselves bald; Neither break bread(713) to the mourner,(714) 7 For the dead to console him, Nor pour him(715) the cup of condolement For his father or mother.

Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8 To sit with them eating and drinking.

For thus saith the Lord of Hosts,(716) 9 The G.o.d of Israel: Lo, I shall stay from this place, In your days, to your eyes, The voices of joy and of gladness, The voices of bridegroom and bride.

Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this-the people's leaving of their G.o.d-and the doom of exile.

Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14 Save me and saved shall I be.(717) Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15 "Where is the Word of the Lord?

Pray let it come!"

But I have not pressed ... (?) 16 Nor for evil(718) kept at Thee, Nor longed for the woeful day, Thyself dost know.

Whatever came forth from my lips To Thy face it was.

Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17 My Refuge in evil days.

Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18 Dismayed, but dismayed not I.

Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster And break them twice over!

XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah devices, for the Law(719) shall not perish from the priest, nor Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.

O Lord, unto me give Thou heed, 19 And hark to the voice of my plea!(720) Shall evil be rendered for good, 20 That they dig a pit for my life?(721) O remember my standing before Thee, To bespeak their good- To turn Thy fury from off them.

Give therefore their sons to famine, 21 And spill them out to the sword.

Let their wives be widows and childless And their men be slain of death- And smitten their youths by the sword in battle.

May crying be heard from their homes, 22 As a troop comes sudden upon them!

For a pit have they dug to catch me, And hidden snares for my feet.

But Thou, O Lord, hast known 23 Their counsels for death against me.

Pardon Thou not their iniquities,(722) Nor blot from Thy Presence their sins;(723) But let them be tumbled before Thee Deal with them in time of Thy wrath.

Verses 21-23 are rejected by Duhm and Cornill, along with XI. 22_b_, 23, XII. 3_b_, XVII. 18 for no textual or metrical reasons, but only because these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah such outbursts of pa.s.sion: just as we have seen them for similarly sheer reasons of sentiment refuse to consider as his the advice to desert to the enemy.(724) Yet they admit inconsistently the genuineness of VI. 11, XI.

20, XV. 15.(725)

Lord, Thou beguiledst me, and beguiled I let myself be, XX. 7 Too strong for me, Thou hast conquered, A jest I have been all the day, Every one mocks me.

As oft as I speak I must shriek, 8 Crying "Violence and spoil."

Yea, the Word of the Lord is become my reproach All day a derision.

If I said, I'll not mind Him(726) 9 Nor speak in His name,(727) Then in my heart 'tis a burning fire, Shut up in my bones.

I am worn away with refraining, I cannot hold on.(728) For I hear the whispering of many, 10 Terror all round!

"Denounce, and let us denounce him,"

-And these my familiars!- Keep ye watch for him tripping, Perchance he'll be fooled, "And we be more than enough for him, And get our revenge."

Yet the Lord He is with me, 11 Mighty and Terrible!

So they that hunt me shall stumble And shall not prevail.

Put to dire shame shall they be When they fail to succeed.

Be their confusion eternal, Nor ever forgotten!

O Lord,(729) Who triest the righteous, 12 Who lookest to the reins and the heart, Let me see Thy vengeance upon them, For to Thee I have opened my cause.(730)

Cursed be the day, XX. 14 Whereon I was born!

The day that my mother did bare me, Be it unblessed!

Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15 Telling my father, "A man child is born to thee!"

Making him glad.

Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16 And did not relent, Let him hear a shriek in the morning, And at noon-tide alarms; That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17 So my mother had been my grave, And great for ever her womb!

For what came I forth from the womb? 18 Labour and sorrow to see, That my days in shame should consume.

Considering the pa.s.sion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are so irregular.(732)

Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were neither vegetables nor machines but men of like pa.s.sions with ourselves.

Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience, honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with G.o.d Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, navely betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate.

For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man-may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which he must drive-painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others rus.h.i.+ng in pa.s.sion before the power he hated but could not withstand.

So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to G.o.d's words to him. _Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed_ and _I set thee this day a fenced city and wall of bronze_.(735) For these last imply that in himself Jeremiah was something different. G.o.d does not speak thus to a man unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable disciple that Christ said, _Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build_.

Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against a.s.syria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even a.s.syria dealt it. These did not weld but broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer to his call to repent: _No'ash, No use! All is up!_ Probably this reflects his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he had to work with.

Poet as he was he had the poet's heart for the beauties of nature and of domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride, and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have children of his own or to take part in any social merriment-in this last respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke out now and then in wild gusts of pa.s.sion against it all?

There is another thing which we must not forget in judging Jeremiah's excessive rage. We cannot find that he had any hope of another life.

Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from his own Oracles or from those attributed to him. Here and now was his only chance of service, here and now must the visions given him by G.o.d be fulfilled or not at all. In the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to come, no gleam even of the martyr's crown. I have often thought that what seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah's pa.s.sion and cursing, let us try to realise how we would have felt had we, like him, found our _one_ service baffled, and the _single_ possible fulfilment of our ideals rendered vain. All of which shows the difference that Christ has made.

2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)

Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his influence to the end of his nation's history.

What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times?

Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that G.o.d Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circ.u.mstance.

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart, I have set thee a prophet to the nations.

From the first and all through it was G.o.d's choice of him, the knowledge of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have seen, into the opposite of himself.