Abstract
The Old Testament book of Jeremiah, from which our first Bible reading today was taken, has long been a favourite of mine. Indeed, as long ago as 1983, when I was still an undergraduate student at St John’s College in Durham, I preached a sermon on the very passage we’ve just heard at a service in the College Chapel. When I became a post-graduate student, I opted to research and write my PhD thesis on the group called the Rechabites, and the main – and nearly only – place in the Bible where the Rechabites turn up is in Jeremiah, in Chapter 35. So I had to study that bit of Jeremiah in depth, and most of the rest of the book of Jeremiah as well, in rather less depth.
Then, when I was in Chichester in the early 1990s, on the staff of the theological college there, in the early 1990s, I taught a course called, ‘Jeremiah: from Book to Prophet and back again’ to a group of local laypeople, as well as covering Jeremiah rather more briefly in my general course for the ordinands at the College.
Much later, when I was in Scotswood, in the inner urban West End of Newcastle upon Tyne, Jeremiah’s letter to the Exiles in Babylon, with its instructions to settle down in the city and to seek its welfare and to pray for it, from Jeremiah 29, was a key theological and spiritual resource for my life and ministry in that context. I even used Jeremiah’s letter as a basis for a presentation I put together for inner-urban churches called ‘The Jeremiah Agenda for the Urban Church.’
So I have studied Jeremiah a lot, and I’ve taught and used Jeremiah a lot. But one of the things about the Scriptures is that there are always new things to discover in them, things you’ve maybe missed all the previous times you’ve read a particular passage. And it has been no exception for me with today’s Old Testament reading from Jeremiah 1. In the middle of that reading is a sentence which I don‘t think I had ever really noticed before I started to look at the passage in preparation for this sermon. The sentence is the words of the LORD to Jeremiah in response to Jeremiah’s protestation that he is too young to speak. The LORD says, ‘You must go to everyone I send you and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will keep you safe.’
Of course, the desire for protection, for safety, is one of the most basic of all human desires. Indeed, I can remember a TV advert for an Insurance company that had that very theme: there was a series of images of people doing various things, some of them even religious, with a voice-over talking about how scientists had long been trying to work out what humanity’s most basic need is. The advert claimed that the answer was discovered when the first manned spacecraft orbited the earth, for those first astronauts could only see one human creation from up in space: the Great Wall of China. The claim was made that the fact that only the Great Wall can be seen from space is proof that our basic desire, need even, is to be kept safe.
Of course, an insurance policy doesn’t actually keep you safe. The fact that I have a comprehensive motor insurance policy has not stopped my car been broken into and having its windows smashed on numerous occasions. What my policy does keep me safe from is the cost of the repairs to the damaged doors and windows – but not from the car actually being damaged in the first place.
But that desire to be protected, to be kept safe, is a fundamental one. And not only is it physical safety. It’s about spiritual safety, too. If God is with us, then we’ll be OK, both in this life and in the next. Indeed, I suspect that a number of parents who bring their children to be baptised are motivated at least in part by a quite natural and proper desire to place their offspring under the care and the protection of the Almighty.
But let’s be clear about what God’s protection is all about. Holy Baptism – or any other claiming of divine protection, for that matter – is not a lucky charm, not a talisman. It won’t keep us from hard times physically or from temptations spiritually. The example of the life of Jeremiah shows that all too clearly. ‘I am with you and will keep you safe,’ God said to him, but that did not prevent him from being rejected, worse being imprisoned and being left for dead. It didn’t stop him from wishing that he had never been born. The promise of God being with him and keeping him safe was not a promise that he would be kept from all the changes and chances of this fleeting world. But it did give Jeremiah the conviction of the rightness of his cause, it did keep him loyal to the message he had been given by the LORD when pressures on body, mind and spirit were encouraging him to pack it all in.
Indeed, it seems to me that if Jeremiah had tried to flee away from the pressures and the persecutions of the world; if he had said, ‘Oh, I’m all right, God’s said he’s with me and he’ll keep me safe, I don’t need to do anything,’ then Jeremiah would have made the LORD’s promise to him null and void. It would no longer have applied. For that promise was tied up with that commission to go and speak the LORD’s word, to be the LORD’s witness in the world. God’s protection came to Jeremiah from within as he faced and endured all sorts of privations without and was obedient to his calling.
And the same surely goes for us. We can’t think of the Church as a place where we can escape the cares and the pressures of the world and thereby find God’s protection and safety. We cannot treat the Sacraments and regular worship as lucky charms – ‘If I do this then God will physically keep me safe.’ It simply doesn’t work as a heavenly insurance policy where if you pay the premium – being baptised or coming to Church – then you get the benefits.
The promise that God made to Jeremiah is ours too: God is with us, God will keep us safe, but only as and when we become like Jeremiah, true disciples, true followers of God, those who have the perseverance to stick to their original commitment through thick and thin, whatever the cost. It’s about taking our faith seriously in the day-to-day rough and tumble of the world, and not just in Church on Sundays.
That sounds hard, doesn’t it? It sounds difficult to achieve, doesn’t it? It sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it? And so it should, for it is. The Christian faith is not here to make us comfortable, in that literal and physical sense. Trevor Huddleston saw that all too well when he titled one of his books about living the Christian life, Naught for your Comfort.
The Christian faith is about making us holy, not keeping us happy. The Christian faith is here to show us the way of blessedness. And the way of blessedness is the hard way, but– as Jeremiah shows us – it is the way where we do and will find God with us and protecting us. ‘I am with you, and I will keep you safe.’
The Apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans
Philip L. Tite, The Apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans: An Epistolary and Rhetorical Analysis, TENTS 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2012. €80.00/$99.00. pp. xiii + 158. ISBN: 978-90-04-22805-4).
It is fair to say that the apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans, even among those interested in non-canonical New Testament texts, has not received significant attention. The letter survives in several Latin manuscripts (the earliest being Codex Fuldensis 546 C.E.) and several medieval translations, although the letter may have originally be composed in Greek. Here Tite addresses that lacuna, with a spirited defence of the value of this often neglect text.
The study is arranged over eight chapters. The introductory discussion surveys previous scholarly attitudes, comments and brief studies on the text. Tite characterizes much of previous scholarship as belonging to the ‘dismissal camp’ (p. 9), since the letter is not studied in its own right and is often seen as no more than an amateurish pastiche or an example of facile pseudepigraphy. The next five chapters are devoted to an epistolary analysis of the prescript (pp. 19-28), the thanksgiving period (pp. 29-42), the letter body (pp. 43-56), the paraenesis (pp. 57-76), and the letter closing (pp. 77-82). In chapter two there is an overview of letter prescripts in Hellenistic epistles in general, as well as a comparison with other Pauline letters (p. 21). Turning to Laodiceans it is noted that there are several points of correspondence with the letter to the Galatians. In relation to the thanksgiving section it is noted that the ‘eschatological finale in the thanksgiving is not designed as a warning, but rather as a promise; a promise that should motivate the recipients to continue to live as they do’ (pp. 40-41). This eschatological insight comes to the fore in chapter seven where the theological outlook is analyzed. Apart from eschatology, the other major theme is seen to be ecclesiology, with Christology, pneumatology and Trinitarian theology playing subsidiary roles. In the concluding chapter it is suggested along with Pervo that Laodiceans ‘mildly sanitized Paul’, moreover the hypothesis is advanced that Laodiceans may be ‘the end product of a transmitted and redacted earlier letter of Paul to the Philippian Christians’ (p. 121). Yet it is also note that Laodiceans has an important relationship with Colossians since its closing remarks, ‘see that this letter is read to the Colossians and that of the Colossians among you’, are related to Col. 4.16. Finally it is suggested that Laodiceans should be understood in a second century context where Paul was both a figure used to crystallize identity (p. 123) and yet an unstable figure that permitted various reconfigurations of the past (p. 124). The volume concludes with two appendices. The first presents the Latin text, translation and the suggested epistolary arrangement of the letter. The second gives a fuller discussion of dating issues.
Overall this book helpfully fills a gap in previous scholarship. It takes a generous approach to evaluating the significance of the epistle. Some of the ‘historical’ hypotheses will require further testing. However, the largest contribution is that this treatment will ensure a that more recognition is given to this largely overlooked composition.