Never Give Up
Jeremiah 32:1-15 (RCL 32:1-3a, 6-15)
Tony’s Overview Video
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Key Text: Jeremiah 32:15
For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.
Hope.
Now that’s a beautiful word. Little in our vocabulary does as much for the heart and the outlook as the word “hope,” and in this text Jeremiah promises hope for a brighter future.
You might think it’s about time. After lessons in which the old prophet predicted a bone-crushing defeat for Israel (September 15) and then wept inconsolably about it (September 22), we finally get to see a glimmer of hope. [DD]
We know what that is like. In what is often the coldest part of winter, a burst of February daffodils brings the promise of spring.
The first garden seed to break the ground in April offers the hope of a coming harvest.
A relatively ordinary day at some point after a traumatic loss breathes hope that life may yet return to “normal.”
In today’s text, Jeremiah does something that would hardly be noticed in ordinary times, but in a city under siege, it became a harbinger of hope.
A bad time (vv. 1-3a)
Modern Americans have no idea what it is like to live under a months-long siege, with an enemy’s military forces cutting off access to supplies and starving the residents while building siege ramps designed to break down the city walls. [DD]
That’s what was happening in Jerusalem sometime around 588 BCE. The Babylonians had defeated the city in 597 but didn’t destroy it. They took King Jehoiachin and a large number of elite citizens captive but left the city intact, with Jehoiachin’s uncle Zedekiah installed as a vassal king.
Zedekiah did as ordered for nearly a decade, but then rebelled and withheld the tribute money. It wasn’t long before the Babylonian troops once again surrounded Jerusalem with blood in their eyes, putting the city under siege.
Trying to carry on with no food on the table but many enemies at the gate would have been a torturous experience for everyone, including the king and those who advised him. Should the city surrender and hope for mercy, or fight to the death despite the odds?
King Zedekiah, a stubborn man strongly influenced by priests and temple prophets who believed God would not allow Jerusalem to fall, was determined to hold fast and fight.
Jeremiah, on the other hand, boldly proclaimed that the city was doomed. On several occasions, Jeremiah told Zedekiah that his best hope was to surrender to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. This did not sit well with the Zedekiah. [DD]
Zedekiah did not want the prophet to be going through the streets questioning his judgment, so he kept him close by putting him under house arrest in the “court of the guard,” which was part of the king’s palace (vv. 1-3a).
We don’t know the precise layout of the palace, but the “court of the guard” probably faced an interior courtyard, so it would have been open to the air. This would have been an improvement over Jeremiah’s previous situation, in which a royal official named Jonathan had accused him of desertion, beaten him, and locked him into an underground cistern that had been turned into a cell.
Things were bad for the prophet, but they could be worse – and would soon get a lot worse for the king.
A mad king (vv. 3b-5)
At some point, according to the narrative, Zedekiah summoned Jeremiah and asked why Jeremiah had predicted that Yahweh would give Jerusalem over to Nebuchadnezzar, and why Jeremiah had insisted that he (Zedekiah) would not escape, but “be given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye” before being taken to Babylon where God would “attend to him.” [DD]
The king’s version of Jeremiah’s prophecy echoes predictions found in several other texts, including 34:2-3, which also speaks of the kings meeting “face to face and eye to eye,” as well as 21:1-7; 37:1-10, 17; and 38:14-28.
The narrative account of Israel’s defeat in 2 Kings says that when the city walls were breached, Zedekiah fled south toward the Arabah, but was captured and taken before Nebuchadnezzar, where he would have seen him face to face and eye to eye.
Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes were among the last things Zedekiah would see: the story says that after Nebuchadnezzar passed sentence, his men slaughtered Zedekiah’s sons before his eyes, then put out his own eyes before marching him in chains to Babylon (2 Kings 25:3-7, repeated in Jer. 39:2-7).
But we get ahead of ourselves. The king had asked Jeremiah a question. “Why do you prophesy and say these things?”
Jeremiah’s answer – if it is an answer – is puzzling. One might expect him to say: “Because that’s what Yahweh told me to say, you ninny,” or “Because it’s obvious that your troops don’t have a chance before the mighty Babylonian army.”
Jeremiah’s response, as it turns out, says nothing at all about why he had prophesied doom on Zedekiah, the city of Jerusalem, and the remaining Israelites.
The prophet apparently took those predictions as so certain that he no longer needed to defend them. Instead, Jeremiah looked beyond the defeat and beyond the exile (which had begun for some ten years earlier) to speak of what lay beyond.
Hope.
A good buy (vv. 6-15)
The prophecy came, not as a direct word, but in the form of a sign. If we take these verses as Jeremiah’s response to the king, he recounted how God had told him that his cousin Hanamel would come and tell him that his relatives in Anathoth, his hometown, were in financial trouble. They needed to sell some land, but wanted to keep it in the family, so they were asking Jeremiah to “redeem” it by purchasing the land. As the nearest kin, he had the first right of refusal (vv. 6-7).
The rules for such transactions were apparently based on Leviticus 25:23-28. A similar arrangement is found in Ruth 4, where Boaz “redeemed” land belonging to Naomi’s late husband after a closer kinsman declined to do it.
For readers familiar with the larger book of Jeremiah, the request seems odd, because an earlier story says that his relatives in Anathoth had once plotted to kill Jeremiah if he didn’t stop prophesying (11:18-23).
Why would the same kinfolk who had sought to silence Jeremiah now come to him as a potential financial savior? It seems highly unlikely.
Perhaps that is why, when Hanamel showed up in the court of the guard as Yahweh had predicted, asking him to redeem the land, that Jeremiah would respond “Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD” (vv. 8-9). Only with God’s intervention could the prior animosity between them be overcome.
Jeremiah agreed to make the purchase, paying 17 shekels of silver. Coins would not be minted in the area for another hundred years, so Jeremiah weighed out the silver using a set of scales and had his friend Baruch draw up two copies of an official deed attesting to the sale. [DD]
The text does not say how the price was determined (about $100 at today’s silver prices), or how Jeremiah happened to have that much silver available to him.
The prophet put considerable emphasis on the business of the deed, instructing that it be publicly drawn up in the court of the guard and signed by witnesses in duplicate, with one copy sealed and the other open so all could read. Baruch was to put the documents in an earthen jar for safekeeping, so they would last for a long time (vv. 10-14). [DD]
Why was it so important for the deed to be preserved?
As a testimony.
But to what? To foolishness? Why would Jeremiah pay good money for land that would soon belong to the Babylonians? The whole idea makes no sense, as Jeremiah himself attested in a prayer that follows this text. With siege ramps set up and the city facing famine, pestilence, and the sword as a background (v. 24), Jeremiah said “Yet you, O Lord GOD, have said to me, ‘Buy the field for money and get witnesses’ – though the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans” (v. 25).
With v. 15 the interchange finally begins to make sense: “For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”
Jeremiah’s purchase in the face of looming disaster was the promise of a day beyond the exile when the people would return, when fields and houses around Jerusalem would once again be bought and sold. As God was bringing disaster upon Judah, God would also bring a better day:
“Fields shall be bought for money, and deeds shall be signed and sealed and witnessed, in the land of Benjamin, in the places around Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, of the hill country, of the Shephelah, and of the Negeb; for I will restore their fortunes, says the LORD” (v. 44).
Hope.
When have you needed hope, and in what areas have you seen it? When we face deep traumas such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a job or the betrayal of someone close, it can be hard to see beyond the tears and the darkness, but we can have hope that God still has a good future for us. With that anchor of hope, our emotions will eventually level out and we will be able to see and enjoy new possibilities for life.
That hope may be found in very ordinary things.
Look for the signs: there is hope.
Adult Teaching Resources
Download the PDF of teaching resources for this lesson.
This PDF contains the Teaching Guide, Digging Deeper, and Hardest Question pages.
Read Scripture online: Jeremiah 32:1-15
Youth Teaching Resources
Parent Prep
There are days when it all seems so dark and desolate that our students need to just see a spark. What is it that you know gives your students hope? What is it that can be the spark for your student? If you don’t know, take the time to figure it out. If you do know, make sure you are ready to implement this spark of hope. Sometimes it just takes a spark to change the darkness into light.
Additional Links/Resources
Read Scripture online: Jeremiah 32:1-15
Download the PDF for youth teaching resources using the button below. This PDF contains the Teaching Guide for this lesson:
Video
Encourage youth to check out this video ahead of the lesson.
“Feels Like Hope” from Mad Max: Fury Road
via www.youtube.com
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