Jeremiah, the Tested Prophet

No prophet suffered as much from his mission as Jeremiah, and none said it with as much truth. Charged with announcing a message no one wanted to hear, he collides with priests, kings, and false prophets, and he pays with his person: blows, prison, pit, threats of death. In overwhelming pages, the Confessions, he even turns against God, who drew him into this combat. And yet he cannot keep silent, for the word he carries is in him like a fire.

The Temple sermon

The conflict breaks out when Jeremiah stands at the gate of the Temple to shatter the people’s false security. Many believe that the presence of the sanctuary protects them whatever they do; Jeremiah throws the truth in their face: “Do not trust the lying words of those who repeat: This is the temple of the Lord.” Jeremiah 7:4 A temple does not save a people who steal, lie, and oppress the poor; God does not let himself be bought by rites when the heart is unjust. He even recalls the sanctuary of Shiloh, once destroyed despite the presence of the ark: the Temple of Jerusalem is no more untouchable. This sermon, which touches the most sacred thing, earns him at once the hatred of the priests and a first arrest. Jeremiah learns that to speak the truth in God’s name can cost very dearly. Another prophet of his time, Uriah, announced the same message and paid for it with his life: the king had him pursued into Egypt, brought back by force, and executed. Jeremiah himself escapes death by a hair, saved by a few elders who recall that a century earlier the prophet Micah had said the same thing without being killed. The comparison is terrible: it shows that a prophet’s fate hangs by a thread, and that Jeremiah, spared this time, knows he now walks under constant threat.

The clay in the potter’s hand

Like the other prophets, Jeremiah announces by gestures as much as by words. God sends him to a potter, and there, before the spoiled vessel that the craftsman takes back and reshapes, he receives a word: “like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, house of Israel.” Jeremiah 18:6 God remains master of his people as the potter of his clay: he can unmake to remake, and the punishment itself aims to take a failed life back in hand. Then Jeremiah carries a wooden yoke on his shoulders to tell Judah to submit to Babylon; he breaks a jar to signify the city that will be broken; he buys a field, on the eve of disaster, to announce that one day lands will be bought again in this ruined country, a stubborn sign of hope. Each gesture makes visible the word he carries.

The Confessions of the prophet

The suffering rises, and Jeremiah expresses it in prayers of unheard-of boldness. He dares to reproach God for having drawn him against his will into a mission that crushes him: “You enticed me, Lord, and I let myself be enticed; you were stronger than I, and you prevailed.” Jeremiah 20:7 Become the laughingstock of all, he would abandon everything, keep silent, disappear. But he is unable to, for the word of God does not let him go: “there was in my heart something like a burning fire, shut up in my bones.” Jeremiah 20:9 There is the secret of his faithfulness: it is not his strength that holds him, but a fire he did not kindle and cannot quench. The prophet does not speak because he is brave, but because he cannot do otherwise.

The pit and the rejected righteous one

The persecutions keep growing. Jeremiah is put in irons; his enemies, exasperated by his calls to surrender, obtain from the king that he be silenced: they lower him into an empty cistern where he sinks into the mud, left to die of hunger. He escapes only by the pity of a foreigner, an Ethiopian servant who pulls him up with ropes. Jeremiah passes through all this forsaken by men, but never by God, who had warned him that he would be attacked without being overcome. His life itself becomes a prophecy: that of the righteous one whom his people reject, thrown to the bottom of the pit and yet raised up, in whom tradition has recognized beforehand a figure of Christ handed over, gone down into the tomb, and raised by the power of God. To the very end, his life will be that of a man without rest. After the fall of Jerusalem, when he might at last have remained in peace on his land, the survivors, against his advice, drag him by force into Egypt, fleeing the vengeance of Babylon. It is there, in exile and far from everything, that tradition places his death. Jeremiah will thus have carried his cross to the last hour, a rejected prophet who knew neither rest nor success, but whose word held firm and crossed the centuries.