Baruch and the Hope of Exile
To the book of Jeremiah is joined a small book carried by the name of Baruch, the faithful secretary of the prophet. Written for the exiles, it is like the prayer of the people far from their land: a confession of the faults that led to disaster, a call to return to the Wisdom that is the Law of God, and the hope of return. A deuterocanonical book, received by the Church, it makes heard the voice of exile turning back, and it carries a word that tradition has read of the Incarnation itself.
Baruch, the companion of Jeremiah
Baruch was the secretary of Jeremiah, the one who wrote under his dictation. One episode makes him known: when the prophet, prevented from appearing at the Temple, entrusted him with all his oracles, it was Baruch who put them in writing on a scroll and went to read them to the people, then to the leaders. Warned, King Jehoiakim had the scroll brought to him and, as it was read, cut off its columns and threw them into the fire of the brazier, until all was burned. Then God commanded that everything be rewritten, and much more besides: the word of God is not suppressed with a knife. This discreet figure of Baruch is that of the faithful disciple, who gathers and hands on the word received at the risk of his life. The book that bears his name prolongs the voice of Jeremiah beyond the catastrophe, into the time of exile, when the people, stripped of everything, must learn to return to God. The episode of the scroll burned then rewritten has a reach that goes beyond Baruch: it shows the very birth of Scripture. Because the prophet could not be everywhere nor last forever, his word was fixed in writing, kept, recopied, handed on. A king could throw a scroll into the fire, he could not erase the word of God, which was reborn more abundant. It is thus that the Bible was formed, through faithful men like Baruch who gathered and saved the word received, so that it might reach, beyond the centuries and the persecutions, down to us.
The prayer and Wisdom
The book opens with a great prayer of penitence: the exiles acknowledge that the misfortune came from their faults, not from any weakness of God, and they implore his forgiveness. It is the language of conversion: instead of accusing God of having abandoned them, they acknowledge their own abandonment of God. Then comes a magnificent poem on Wisdom, that Wisdom which the nations seek in vain and which God alone possesses, for he has given it to his people under the form of the Law. To return to Wisdom is to return to the Covenant: there is the way of return, not by arms but by the conversion of the heart. The book closes on words of consolation to Jerusalem, invited to lay aside her mourning and to stand upright, for her scattered children will come back to her, brought home by God in joy.
Wisdom come upon the earth
The poem on Wisdom contains a word that the Church has always read in the light of Christ. After saying that God alone knows Wisdom and has given it to Israel, the text adds: “she appeared on earth and lived among mankind.” Baruch 3:38 The Wisdom of God, until then hidden, came to dwell in the midst of men. What Baruch said of Wisdom identified with the Law, the Gospel will say of the Word made flesh: the eternal Wisdom took a face, lived our life, in Jesus. Thus the book of exile, written in the night of deportation, already carries the announcement of the greatest coming.
Toward the one who comes
The whole message of Jeremiah, of the Lamentations, and of Baruch converges toward one same point. Through ruin, exile, and mourning, God never ceases to prepare a salvation greater than all that was lost. The prophet of tears, who weeps over the city that rejects him, announces Christ weeping over Jerusalem; the new covenant written on hearts is fulfilled in the cup of the Last Supper; the righteous Branch of David will come out of the felled stump; and Wisdom, one day, will appear on the earth. The book most marked by misfortune is also one of the most turned toward the future: it teaches us to hope against all appearance, because the faithfulness of God is new every morning, and because at the end of the night comes the One whom all the waiting called for. Thus closes the great book of Jeremiah and his companions, which will have led the reader from the summit of catastrophe to the most tenacious of hopes. No book of the Old Testament has looked misfortune in the face with as much truth, and none has been able, from the depth of that misfortune, to announce with as much force the faithfulness of God. This is why the Church returns ceaselessly to Jeremiah: he teaches us to pass through the nights without lying about their darkness, and to await in them, against all odds, the light that comes.