Jeremiah and God's Plans of Well-being

6 God's Desires Contested—The Case Embodied by Strange Resemblance and in Negative Space

125 6 God’s Desires Contested—The Case Embodied by Strange Resemblance and in Negative Space Chapters 21–45, 52 The lives of prophet and king mirror one another in their limited choices and freedom. Mark Roncace, Jeremiah, Zedekiah, and the Fall of Jerusalem The case developing in this book shows God and Jeremiah embarked on an urgent challenge of persuasion, aiming first themselves to see and then to show reluctant audiences that something apparently harmful may be good, that something vastly nonpreferred must be chosen. Their project continues to meet powerful resistance in diverse ways. We have glimpsed God struggling to invest in a salutary promise , tempering and converting a divine anger with its capacity, if not preference, for violent retribution. We have witnessed God, attributing distasteful speech to Lady Zion and the men of Judah—words showing all too clearly that they do not deserve a gift of mercy, are not ready to receive it. We have heard God soliloquize, reach out for insight in apparent isolation or in nonongenial company. As God contemplates the human heart and marvels at its capacities and deficiencies, we sense inchoative movement beyond hurt and reprisal to something more compassionate . But move God does. Jeremiah, though voicing his anguish and anger, commits his cause to God, whether he can yet be said to understand the implications of his choice very well at that moment or not. The two character sets engaged early in the prophetic book—Lady Zion and the men of Judah—have in our hearing spoken harshly to God: to deny and alibi, to blame and counteraccuse. More recently, they have mostly fallen silent, in two senses: They made no clear response to the preaching offered them in chaps. 11–20, simply did not reply. And in the long section of 20–39, they mostly ceased 126 god’s desires contested being given discourse, underlining their refusal, or perhaps their powerlessness. But amid resistance and silence, we glimpsed a single scene (chap. 26) where Jeremiah ’s case was taken seriously by some listening, a moment to which we will return in our next chapter. The main spate of speech, divine and prophetic comingling as they do in this genre of biblical prophecy, turned from people toward leaders, as reviewed in the last chapter. We heard priests accused of thwarting their role by abuse of authority , prophets distorting theirs by illicit blasts of language. Against the insistence of YHWH and Jeremiah that the only solution for the crisis facing Judah must be an urgent choice to resettle in Babylon and a willingness to remain there, other guild professionals have argued that such a choice is not necessary, or that the stay can be brief, or even that—since some have removed themselves—others can be held excused. But the leaders most excoriated have been kings, both as a set and by name. The four kings succeeding Josiah exemplify, each distinctively in God-and-Jeremiah ’s constructions, disastrous choices: Jehoahaz, gone to Egypt and disappeared there; Jehoiachin, hurled to Babylon untimely, planning his descendants on the throne in Jerusalem; Jehoiakim, refusing, opposing, and thwarting Jeremiah and his deity in every way possible; Zedekiah, displaying not the determined refusal of his royal brother but equally resistant in his delaying tactics. The relationship between Jeremiah and this last Judean king is the primary focus of this present chapter, as the king provides the prophet with the opportunity to begin an intense phase of prophecy: enacting by unexpected analogy the situation of God’s Judean project and making tangible in negative space the inevitable outcome of continued deferral of response. Though there are some 350 verses in the book of Jeremiah set either directly or implicitly during the reign of King Zedekiah, the main subject of this chapter is seven narrative occasions on which king and prophet confer, with special attention given to the last of those sessions (38:14–28).1 The units and their matrices on which I draw primarily, named (in the previous chapter and here) for easy reference are: 21:1–14: wistful wish flattened; 27:1–22: yokes contested; 32:1–44: land deed needed; 34:1–22: slave reprieve revoked; 37:3–21: disputed departure; 38:1–13: in and out of Malchiah’s mud. Having just sketched and summarized the bigger picture in which these seven scenes are embedded, the purpose of this present chapter is to continue to show how Jeremiah struggles to make his “submit and...