Guard . . . King . . . Official
When he got to the Benjamin Gate, the officer on guard there, Irijah son of Shelemiah, son of Hananiah, grabbed Jeremiah the prophet, accusing him, “You’re deserting to the Chaldeans!” . . .
So Jeremiah entered an underground cell in a cistern turned into a dungeon. He stayed there a long time.
Later King Zedekiah had Jeremiah brought to him. The king questioned him privately, “Is there a Message from GOD?” . . .
Ebed-melek the Ethiopian, a court official assigned to the royal palace, heard that they had thrown Jeremiah into the cistern. . . . Ebed-melek went immediately from the palace to the king and said, “My master, O king—these men are committing a great crime in what they’re doing, throwing Jeremiah the prophet into the cistern and leaving him there to starve. He’s as good as dead. There isn’t a scrap of bread left in the city.” . . .
Ebed-melek . . . pulled Jeremiah up out of the cistern by the ropes.
Jeremiah 37:13, 16-17; 38:7-13
I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or less transient morbid state, in a creative self-confrontation, or in an adolescent state sometimes combining both; wherefore on occasion I find myself asking a student who claims that he is in an “identity crisis” whether he is complaining or boasting. The pertinent question, if it can be put into the first person at all, would be, “What do I want to make of myself, and what do I have to work with?”
Erik H. Erikson[1]
Most figures in history books are flashes of color that illuminate an episode and are then forgotten. How many can recall ten years back the name of the Secretary of State—certainly one of the most prestigious positions in the world? Who can name the best-selling author of five years ago? But the significance of a few persons, instead of fading, blazes more brightly each century. Their significance blazes because they did not merely fulfill a prestigious role or get associated with a notable event. They became human in depth and thoroughness. These few, in R. P. Blackmur’s words, “show an attractive force, massive and inexhaustible, and a disseminative force which is the inexhaustible spring or constant declaration of value. Where your small man is a knoll to be smoothed away [such a person is] a mountain to be mined on all flanks.”[2]
Jeremiah is a “mountain to be mined on all flanks.” He centers an epoch. He was a first-hand participant in the events which became the pivot for a millennium. The age of Jeremiah is a nodal ganglion that shoots out nerve endings in all directions of human existence: philosophy, religion, politics, art. In China, India, Israel and Greece the foundations are laid for universal history. Karl Jaspers describes Jeremiah’s century as the “axial time” (Achsenzeit).[3]
The man made headlines. His theological perception, his religious sensibility, his rhetorical power, his emotional range, his confrontational courage—these all made their historical mark. But the primary interest of people of faith in Jeremiah is not in his historical impact but in his personal development.
Only a few people make the historical headlines, but anyone can become human. Is it possible to be great when you are taking out the garbage as well as when you are signing a peace treaty? Is it possible to exhibit grace in your conduct in the kitchen as well as in a nationally televised debate?
I once knew a man well who had a commanding public presence and exuded charm to all he met. What he said mattered. He had influence. He was always impeccably dressed and unfailingly courteous. But his secretary was frequently in tears as a result of his rudely imperious demands. Behind the scenes he was tyrannical and insensitive. His public image was flawless; his personal relationships were shabby.
How did Jeremiah deal with the people day by day? What was it like to be with him when he wasn’t preaching a sermon, or polishing an oracle, or waging a confrontation? The sifted reflection of the centuries adds up to an impressive consensus: Jeremiah became human in a complex and developed personal sense. An examination of some of the persons with whom he had to do strengthens our estimation of his “full humanness,” Abraham Maslow’s phrase for our rarely realized destinies.[4]
In chapters thirty-seven to thirty-nine of Jeremiah, decisive historical events are taking place. World history is being shaped before our eyes. The nation is being radically altered. Powerful theological realities are emerging. Jeremiah is in the middle of it all. But Jeremiah, while not oblivious to the big issues, is mostly dealing with persons, persons with names. Named persons formed the raw material for Jeremiah’s daily life of faith. Every life of faith, whether it is conspicuous or obscure, is worked out in the context of persons not unlike the persons with whom Jeremiah rubbed shoulders. Quite apart from the big ideas we ponder, the important movements we participate in, the particular jobs we are given, named persons constitute most of the agenda of our lives. Three men on Jeremiah’s agenda are representatively significant: Irijah the guard, Zedekiah the king, Ebed-melek the Ethiopian official.
The city was under final attack by the Babylonians. It would soon fall. Jeremiah had given counsel to the leaders and had preached to the people that the Babylonian presence was God’s judgment: it should be accepted and submitted to. They had sinned and they were being judged. The judgment was God’s way of restoring wholeness.
People didn’t like that. They kept trying to find ways to avoid the reality of judgment, to think in other categories than those of right and wrong, sin and irresponsibility. One of their substitute ways of thinking was in terms of loyalty and disloyalty. Patriotism was used to muddle the sense of morality: “Our beloved country is being attacked and we must be loyal to it; in times of crisis it is not right to criticize your leaders. It is disloyal, an act of treachery.”
Using jingoist language is far easier than taking responsibility for righteousness in the nation. Far easier to shout patriotic slogans than to work patriotically for justice.
One day Jeremiah was going out the city gate to his hometown of Anathoth, three miles away. Irijah, the sentry, arrested him on the grounds that he had caught him defecting to the enemy.
Jeremiah had lived in Jerusalem all his adult life. He had been a public figure for over thirty years. He had established credentials as a loyal friend and adviser to the great King Josiah. He had never for a moment rejected or repudiated his identity as a Jew or exempted himself from any of the obligations of membership in that community. To anyone who knew him he obviously was not a bystander criticizing and not a turncoat propagandizing, but an insider agonizing.
Irijah led the man he had arrested to his bosses, the princes, who beat him and imprisoned him. Apparently they had been waiting for any incident that they could use to pounce on him. Irijah, with the undiscriminating reflexes of a watchdog, pounced.
Irijah was a man who used his job to escape his responsibilities as a person. He was a bureaucrat in the worst sense of the word, a person who hides behind the rules and prerogatives of a job description to do work that destroys people. Without considering morality or righteousness, God or person, he did his job. We meet these people all the time. And there are more and more jobs like this all the time. Every day people are hurt and demeaned by officeholders who refuse to look us in the eye, shielding themselves behind regulations and paperwork, secretaries and committees.
Irijah was the kind of person that Melville, in his novel The Confidence Man, describes with great scorn as “the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but you are useless for right.”[5] Irijah, no doubt, would have protested vehemently that he had nothing against Jeremiah personally, that he was just doing what he had been told to do.
The most famous twentieth-century instance of Irijah is Adolf Eichmann, key figure in the murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany. At his trial in Jerusalem it became quite clear that he had nothing against the Jews; he was just doing his job. No great venom of hate flowed in him; he was simply being obedient to what his superiors told him. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe him.[6] Incalculable evil comes from these unlikely sources: quiet, efficient, little people doing their job, long since having given up thinking of themselves as responsible, moral individuals.
Jeremiah responded to Irijah with implacable endurance. He did not bluster and curse. He did not threaten and rail. Nor was he a lifeless doormat. He asserted his innocence and he endured; he accepted this banal stupidity with, it seems, equanimity, and persisted in his vocation.
Zedekiah was not properly the king but a puppet king appointed by the Babylonians. The actual king, Jehoiachin, had been taken into exile in 598 B.C. along with most of the ruling class of the city. His uncle, Zedekiah, was appointed to rule in his place. Zedekiah was king for eleven years. All through those eleven years he had frequent conversations with Jeremiah. Jeremiah had been closely associated with his brother, the great Josiah, and with both his nephews, the kings Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin.
Zedekiah had mixed feelings about Jeremiah. He respected him. How could he not respect him? His stature was immense; his integrity impressive; his courage legendary. But he was also an embarrassment, for Zedekiah permitted himself to be surrounded with the usual crowd of self-serving sycophants who were trying to gain advantage from association with his kingship. He could well guess that Jeremiah had a quiet contempt for such persons.
A weak, vacillating person, Zedekiah was appointed to rule, we suspect, because the Babylonians knew that he had no will of his own and would submit to what was commanded. What they failed to anticipate was that he would do what he was told by anyone who happened to be in the room with him. When the Babylonians were gone and ultranationalists of the most reckless sort began showing up with elaborate plots to throw off the Babylonian rule with the help of an Egyptian alliance, he was easily swayed. Sometimes he would have qualms of conscience and call Jeremiah in for a consultation and, for a brief time, pay attention to the prophetic word. But nothing lasted long with Zedekiah. The man was a marshmallow. He received impressions from anyone who pushed hard enough. When the pressure was off, he gradually resumed his earlier state ready for the next impression. In contrast to Jeremiah, who was formed from within by obedience to God and faith in God (a steel post!), Zedekiah took on whatever shape the circumstances required.
Zedekiah shows that good intentions are worthless if they are not coupled with character development. We don’t become whole persons by merely wanting to become whole, by consulting the right prophets, by reading the right book. Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.
After the princes threw Jeremiah into the dungeon at the time of his arrest by Irijah, Zedekiah secretly brought him to his palace for a conversation. Zedekiah would not do this openly for fear of the princes. But neither would he ignore him, fearing that he might not get in on an important truth that Jeremiah might provide. Later the princes, enraged at Jeremiah preaching from his prison cell, threw him into a cistern. Zedekiah did nothing to prevent it.
Zedekiah was hardly a person at all. There was nothing to him. He fit into whatever plans stronger people had for him. He was not an evil person. There is no evidence that he premeditated wrongdoing. But, and this is the significant fact, neither did he premeditate goodness. And goodness does not just happen. It does not spring full-bodied out of the head of kingly intent. It requires careful nurture, disciplined training, long development. For this, Zedekiah had no stomach.
Zedekiah must have been one of the most difficult persons in all of Jeremiah’s life. One king (Josiah) had been his close friend; one king (Jehoiakim) had been his implacable enemy. But this king was formless: he could never be counted on for anything, whether positive or negative. Meanwhile Jeremiah maintained his witness under the faithfulness of his God, quite apart from the fickleness of his king.
Ebed-melek was a foreigner, a black man from Ethiopia and an official in the administrative government. When he learned that Jeremiah was in the cistern, he knew that he would die quickly if not rescued. Although the cistern was without water, it was swampy with mud and Jeremiah was sinking into it. He must die soon, if not by suffocation, by exposure.
Ebed-melek went to the king and confronted him with the injustice that he had permitted. He got authority to carry out a rescue operation. He took three men with him, got ropes, went to the palace wardrobe and got rags, and then went to the cistern. He lowered the ropes to Jeremiah and instructed him to put the rags under his armpits so that the ropes would not cut into his flesh as they pulled him out. He rescued Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was never popular. He was never surrounded with applause. But he was not friendless. In fact, Jeremiah was extremely fortunate in his friends. Twenty years or so earlier, under King Jehoiakim, Jeremiah was almost murdered, but Ahikam ben Shaphan intervened and saved him (Jer 26:24). Baruch was his disciple and secretary, loyal and faithful, sticking with him through difficult times to the very end. And Ebed-melek, the Ethiopian eunuch, came to his aid. “One friend in a lifetime is much,” wrote Henry Adams, “two are many; three are hardly possible.”[7] Jeremiah had three.
Ebed-melek risked his life in rescuing Jeremiah. Being a foreigner he had no legal rights. He was going against popular opinion in a crisis that was hysterical with wartime emotion. That didn’t matter. A friend is a friend. Ebed-melek didn’t indulge in sentimental pity for Jeremiah, philosophically lamenting his fate; he went to the king, he got ropes, he even thought of getting rags for padding so that the ropes would not cut, he enlisted help, and he pulled him out of the cistern. He acted out his friendship.
Not everyone in Jerusalem that year was just doing his job. Not all were sailing under the winds of popular opinion. There were a few people for whom a friend was more significant than a job, for whom a friend was more significant than a calculated advantage, for whom a friend meant a commitment and was worth a risk.
The simple fact that he had friends says something essential about Jeremiah: he needed friends. He was well developed in his interior life. It was impossible to deter him from his course by enmity or by flattery. He was habituated to solitude. But he needed friends. No one who is whole is self-sufficient. The whole life, the complete life, cannot be lived with haughty independence. Our goal cannot be to not need anyone. One of the evidences of Jeremiah’s wholeness was his capacity to receive friendship, to let others help him, to be accessible to mercy. It is easier to extend friendship to others than to receive it ourselves. In giving friendship we share strength, but in receiving it we show weakness. But well-developed persons are never garrisoned behind dogmas or projects, but rather they are alive to a wide spectrum of relationships.
The theological ideas, historical forces and righteous causes that touched Jeremiah’s life never remained or became abstract but were worked out with persons, persons with names. He never used labels that lumped people into depersonalized categories. It can come as no surprise to find that there are more personal names in the book of Jeremiah than in any other prophetic book.[8]