Jeremiah is a Heartbroken, Public Mystic

Contemplation in the Bible part 3

Exploring the contours of biblical contemplation is dangerous. It upsets comfortable worldviews, forces us to see reality and ourselves as we are, and demands nothing less than whole-life transformation. This is nowhere the case more than with the Hebrew prophets and in particular the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is a mystic with God’s Word burning in his bones. He’s one of those prophets whose language is so extreme, violent, and offensive that it is often excruciating to read. He is R-rated, holds nothing back, spares no metaphor. He wields his broken, bloody heart, which mirrors God’s broken, bloody heart, for all to see. He functions as a literary poet that we know is great but whose work resides on our shelf collecting dust. We might place his disaster-ridden scroll alongside the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s visions of hell and the contemporary American poet Charles Bukowski’s drunken pulp.

Dire times, however, call for dire poetic and prophetic imaginations.

Ancient Israel in Jeremiah’s day is at its end. The Assyrians have already conquered the north. Southern Israel, known as Judah, has survived over the years by the skin of its teeth. They have eked out an existence through realpolitik negotiation and pinball-like protection from whichever superpower happens to be ascendant in the moment: first Assyria, then briefly Egypt, until yet another Empire appears on the horizon. Encroaching from the East are the Babylonians, a rival power rising up to conquer the conquerors.

Jeremiah steps into this breach, sees and names the writing on Israel’s wall: it is over.

There is no escaping defeat. Jerusalem’s ramparts are no match for the Empire’s chariots, soldiers, and swords. Israel is a puny nation sandwiched between greater powers; they are not the Babylonians’ main threat, but they stand in the way. It’s time, then, for Jeremiah and Israel to accept the unbearable burden of reality. It’s time to realize that the oncoming war will destroy sacred places and objects, that cultures will be decimated, that people will be deported, and that innocents will die.

This is what the Empire does, and this is what the Empire will do.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

God picks the prophet Jeremiah as a communications secretary and throws him into the political mess. In chapter 1, he receives a call, similar to the call Moses received from God, to be a deliverer. Like Moses, he questions his fitness for duty. He says, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” (1:6). The call functions similarly to other prophetic calls in the Hebrew Bible, except this time, instead of delivering the people from slavery as Moses did, Jeremiah announces God’s intention to deliver the people into the hands of their oppressor. Sometimes God’s messengers do not have good news to share.

Or, as a mentor used to say to me, the gospel is bad news before it is good.

Prophets are the Bible’s public mystics. Prophet-mystics do not receive God’s fiery word for their private edification; instead, they function as messengers of God’s Word of justice and mercy to the people and king. Prophets are often in fundamental tension with kings, dwelling at the periphery of the center.

Jeremiah, on the one hand, firmly dwells on the edge. He is a pastor’s kid from an insignificant village called Anathoth (1:1). He carries with him the typical ancient Israelite villager experience of crushing poverty, Assyrian over-taxation, and urban economic complicity with the Empire at the expense of the rural poor.

Outsider that he is, Jeremiah nevertheless has inside access. He maintains several friends in Jerusalem’s high places: an elite scribe named Baruch, for one (chapter 45); a prominent man and family named Shaphon, for another (26:24). Jeremiah is a confidante and thorn in the side of kings, and, as disturbing as his poetry is, people listen to him.

Contemporary equivalents of the prophet’s role are rare. Ancient Israel built the faithful moral voice into their political structure. The prophet cries out on behalf of Yahweh for justice and the needs of the poor, holding the powerful accountable when they make a mockery of God’s vision of wholeness: “For scoundrels are found among my people . . . they know no limits in deeds of wickedness” (5:26, 28). Wicked deeds, of course, span millennia. Were he to prophesy today, Jeremiah might level his ire at voter suppression, the denial and suppression of science, and the scapegoating of immigrants. The best American equivalent to the ancient prophet is likely Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King, who could phone Lyndon B. Johnson on the same day that he went to jail for nonviolent civil disobedience and protesting racial inequality. Like King, Jeremiah balanced both access and critical distance.

There are other prophets at the center of power in Jeremiah’s day and ours, but these are, he tells us, false prophets. They are yes-men and -women who only tell of perpetual good news. Jeremiah rails against them: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (6:13–14).

Jeremiah’s task is to display the wound to treat it. It is the same task as that of Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the force behind the new museum in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to the victims of lynching. At this museum, eight hundred large steel columns hang, each of them representing an American county and bearing the names, if known, of those murdered. To quote the New York Times, there hangs the name of Park Banks, “lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman.” There hangs the name of “Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for walking behind the wife of his white employer.”

We carry such trauma and wounds in our collective hearts and bodies. There is no escape from the wound, no possibility of healing unless we first expose it.

Mystics are those, some say, who are one with God. Divine union is the end point of the classic mystical itinerary in the Christian tradition. But the popular misconception of such language is that divine union is a stage enjoyed apart from the everyday, or worse yet, disconnected from the darkness, carelessly treating the wound or avoiding the wound altogether. There’s a phrase for that in spirituality circles since the 1980s—spiritual bypassing—and it occurs when we use religion to overlook or cloak our emotional and psychological needs.

Jeremiah does not fall into this trap. Jeremiah is a mystic gifted instead with Yahweh’s terrifying words in his mouth and the holiness of tears. He is one with God, but the oneness is lament rather than repose. The great Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel even suggested that God’s very self is grieving through Jeremiah. He wrote that “Jeremiah depicted the dramatic tension of the inner life of God. [His] words are aglow with the divine pathos that can be reflected, but not pronounced: God is mourning Himself.” Jeremiah’s heart has fallen into loving union with Yahweh to such a degree that there is no clear line where Jeremiah’s heartbreak and Yahweh’s sorrow begin. I can’t help but think that we need such heartbroken prophets today.

Note: This week’s post is a continued excerpt from my chapter “Contemplation in the Bible: Where, When, How,” in Contemplation and Community: A Gathering of Fresh Voices for a Living Tradition, edited by Jessica Smith and Stuart Higginbotham.

Two Book Launch Events *This Week*

Images Cinema, Williamstown, MA, October 22, 7pm:

Join us in the Images Lounge for an engaging conversation with local writer, film lover and former Williamstown pastor Mark Longhurst to celebrate the publication of his new book The Holy Ordinary: A Way to God. Taking inspiration from mystics, modern prophets, and saints, with surprising insights from Christian scriptures, Mark writes about mysticism as something available to everyone. Through “How to be Contemplative and Active” and “Live Green like Hildegard of Bingen,” Mark’s book speaks to each person’s need for transformation. The evening will feature a book reading, discussion, and book signing.

Registration: Space is limited and pre-registration is required.

Center for Spiritual Imagination, Online, October 24, 7pm:

You are warmly invited to join us for an engaging online conversation with Community of the Incarnation member Mark Longhurst, author of The Holy Ordinary, a new book that explores the availability of every person to a contemplative life. Co-hosted by Adam Bucko, Director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination and Kris Coleman, Program Director, this online event promises to be a space for reflection, inspiration, and community as we gather to explore the sacred in the ordinary moments of life.

Registration: Register for the Zoom link here.