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7 Getting Out
- University of South Carolina Press
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155 7 Getting Out Chapters 30–33, 24, 26, 29 The only chance of newness is due to God’s radical and undeserved action. Walter Brueggemann, Commentary In the previous pages of this book, my argument has singled out and valorized the reluctant readiness of some in Judah and Jerusalem to relocate to Babylon in order to survive. I have tried to show how counterintuitive and dispreferred that decision would be for any steeped—as I presume the people of Judah and Jerusalem were—in the importance of God’s project for the people of Judah dwelling in the land itself. A prompt to choose otherwise would have seemed perverse. The gift of heritage land would have been assumed and considered to be inherently part of God’s deep desire. I have shown the possibility, and I hope plausibility, of the deity’s coming to this exile-insight via soliloquy, then communicating it to a prophet who did not welcome it but came eventually to invest in his responsibility to preach this sojourn to resistant contemporaries. And preach exile Jeremiah has done in multiple ways: verbally and visually, by plain language and with imagery, in positive and in negative constructs. Part of his ministry, as we have just examined, was Jeremiah’s enacting the refusal he was meeting in order to confront resisters with the outcome they are choosing, perhaps before it is too late to opt differently. That is, Jeremiah’s own self in and out of confinement made visible the futility of nonresettlement in Babylon.1 The purpose of the present chapter is to examine Jeremiah’s dealings with the particular group who appear to have heard, understood, and heeded his prophetic preaching and relocated to the east well before the final days of siege. Though the main focus will be on the chapters that celebrate most prominently the gift given to and through this resettling community (chapters 30–33), we will also draw together from elsewhere within the prophetic book what we can learn of these citizens: pushing off from chaps. 10, 17–18, slowing a bit at 24, 26, 29, reviewing 34, 45, 51 (its last verses), finally to look once more at the final words of the book (end of chap. 52). 156 getting out The point to explore and establish here is the whole movement of going to, staying in, returning from Babylon. It is not simply a matter of temporality and spatiality, though it is that. It is also a matter of imaginative relocation and transformation, at a deeper experiential level, a change cultural and spiritual that requires but transcends time and space. Though we lack the detail we would like about life in exile, still we can sense that it will have been vastly different from life lived at home. Insofar as we, at a great historical remove, think exile a simple and easily grasped matter, we reduce it and deprive it of its power to address us. We must touch back on the analogy with which we opened this book, the choice of our own elders, at the end of productive lives, urged to forsake all they have known for what seems and is in many ways a diminishment. Or perhaps it is time to think of another analogy, the vast and uncertain challenges of climate change and our reluctance—even on the part of the most convinced of us—to make substantial and far-reaching changes in our ways of life, changes that we know will not reverse for the situation for us. The stakes are the highest imaginable, and yet we delay to change, hoping it won’t be necessary, at least for us. Glancing Back: 10: 17–18 As we recall the commissioning of young Jeremiah, we know that amid his assignment of uprooting and destroying, overthrowing and pulling down, was also the charge to build and to plant (1:10). It is not difficult to associate the socalled destructive verbs with prophetic events, to see that much of his language articulates those four negative processes. But we recall that he is assigned to build and plant, and so we are ready now to see how this step goes. And we also sampled in the book’s overture, if fleetingly, a proleptic and imaginative moment (10:11–16) where after many painful and discordant utterances exchanged among characters, the deity, the prophet, and the relocated community blended voices in harmony, appear to have come to agreement on the...