Jeremiah
2:4-13
I’m grateful for modern plumbing and a municipal water
system, because I once lived in a place that depended on cisterns.
In the Virgin Islands, as in most of the Caribbean, there
is no real water table because the islands are so small. As soon as you begin to dig down into the
ground, you reach salt water that cannot be used for drinking and as soon as
you start watering crops with it, the salt kills them and poisons the land
until it leaches back out again over a period of years. There are a few freshwater streams, but not
enough to support a large population. In
that kind of setting, you learn the value of water. Building codes in the islands require the
construction of cisterns to gather runoff from every roof so that rainwater can
be pumped back up again for washing and for general use, although it cannot
really be used safely for drinking or cooking.
These cisterns have to be maintained and resealed regularly, though,
because they crack and the water runs out into the earth.
Another place that depended on cisterns was the ancient
city of Jerusalem, where the water system had to be carefully protected as a
matter of defense. Sometime not long
after the year 900 B.C. a tunnel was dug to bring fresh water inside the city’s
walls, and it was repeatedly strengthened and re-engineered to provide water
for Jerusalem when it came under siege.
Without that water, some of it kept in cisterns, the people inside the
walls would have died of thirst. With
that water, they could survive attack.
If you let the cisterns go to ruin, you were ignoring your own safety.
Jeremiah had a chance to see at least one cistern of
Jerusalem close up. He had been warning
that the city, under siege by a Babylonian army, could only be saved by
surrendering. That put him at odds with
the army, and several officers threw him into a cistern to shut him up, with
the intention of leaving him there to rot.
[Jeremiah 38:4] If the cistern
had been maintained properly, it would have been filled with water and he would
have drowned. Since it was cracked, he
found himself in mud instead and lived until his friends pulled him out.
[Jeremiah 38:10] What a weird thought it
must have been to realize that the only reason he survived was because the city
really was unprepared, as he had said.
Surely that had something to do with his awareness that
the people were unprepared for their time of difficulty because they had turned
away from finding their security in God and God alone and had turned to
idolatry of many types. As he put it,
“my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken
me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked
cisterns that can hold no water.” [Jeremiah 2:13]
I
think about that sometimes for our own times and circumstances, both as a
people of faith and as individuals.
I worry that sometimes we have
turned away from a God who is both powerful and loving, who describes himself
as “a jealous God” [Exodus 20:5 and
34:14], whom the book of Job [38:1] pictures as speaking from a whirlwind, who
is, as the book of Hebrews [12:29] says, “a
consuming fire” and instead worship a god who is merely “nice”. Jeremiah saw trouble beginning when the
people forgot about or willfully ignored the God whom they had known.
“Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of
Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land
of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no
one lives?” [Jeremiah 2:6]
A
God who can do things like that is one that can be trusted, and doesn’t need to
be replaced with idols and false gods that make claims that will never be
fulfilled.
A God like that can even, in fact,
lead his people into dangerous or unlikely territory, precisely because he can
preserve and keep them. Think about the
confusing world of Jesus’ parables.
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich
neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor,
the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And
you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at
the resurrection of the righteous.” [Luke 14:12-14]
That
goes against all social convention. And
if we don’t have a sense of the proper give-and-take of daily life, what is
there? I mean, it’s one thing to invite
people who cannot return the favor, but what’s all this about deliberately
avoiding the people who can? But at
least it’s consistent with a God who is more concerned about compassion than
appearances. It’s more along the lines
of a God who can and does watch over the troubled, which at some point in life
is going to include everyone.
God may be confusing sometimes. Jeremiah saw his hand in history, but never
in the most obvious ways. Certainly he
confused and sometimes even frustrated Jeremiah, and he was not the last one. Teresa of Avila, one of the great Christian
mystics, is reported to have said to God at one point in her life, “If this is how you treat your friends,
no wonder you have so many enemies.” He
does not spare us our struggles, but he sees us through them, and that is one
of the ways that we know he is real, because he has never spared himself,
either.
Real faith is faith in the God who himself suffered in
the person of his Son, who has known what it is, like Jeremiah, to be condemned
to death unjustly. Jeremiah had faith
and God rescued him, lifting him from the mud of a cracked cistern. Jesus went one step further, even dying, and only
then being raised back to life from the darkness of the grave. There is nothing that a God like that cannot
do, and with faith in that God, there is no trouble or trial that can overwhelm
you.
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours
is the kingdom of God. Blessed
are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep
now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you
when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on
account of the Son of Man. Rejoice
in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for
that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”
[Luke 6:20-23]
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