Jeremiah
The Message of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah of the family of priests who lived in Anathoth in the country of Benjamin. GOD’s Message began to come to him.
Jeremiah 1:1-2
What’s in a name? The history of the human race is in names. Our objective friends do not understand that, since they move in a world of objects which can be counted and numbered. They reduce the great names of the past to dust and ashes. This they call scientific history. But the whole meaning of history is in the proof that there have lived people before the present time whom it is important to meet.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy[1]
The first thing that I can remember wanting to be when I grew up was an Indian fighter. Only a couple of generations before I was born the area in which I grew up was Indian country. I could walk from my house into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in about twenty minutes. On most Saturdays through my boyhood years I carried a lunch with me and roamed for the day in those hills, exploring forests and streams, imagining myself matching wits with treacherous Indians.
If anyone would have pressed me to account for what I was doing on those rambles, I’m not sure I could have done it, but the feelings are still sharp and vivid in my memory: a feeling of adventure in the wilderness in contrast to the protected and prosaic life in the town; a feeling of goodness in contest with evil, for in those days the only Indian stories I had heard featured them scalping innocent travelers.
All the great stories of the world elaborate one of two themes: that all life is an exploration like that of the Odyssey or that all life is a battle like that of the Iliad. The stories of Odysseus and Achilles are archetypal. Everyone’s childhood serves up the raw material that is shaped by grace into the life of mature faith.
I had most of my facts wrong on those wonderful Saturdays. The wilderness that I thought I was exploring was owned by the Great Northern Railroad and was already plotted for destruction by executives in a New York City skyscraper; the Indians that I supposed were darkly murderous were, I learned later, noble and generous, themselves victims of rapacious early settlers. My facts were wrong; all the same there were two things essentially right about what I experienced. One, there was far more to existence than had been presented to me in home and school, in the streets and alleys of my town, and it was important to find out what it was, to reach out and explore. Two, life was a contest of good against evil and the battle was for the highest stakes—the winning of good over evil, of blessing over malignity. Life is a continuous exploration of ever more reality. Life is a constant battle against everyone and anything that corrupts or diminishes its reality.
After a few years of wandering those hills and never finding any Indians, I realized that there was not much of a market any longer for Indian fighters. I was forced to abandon that fantasy, and I did it readily enough when the time came, for I have always found that realities are better in the long run than fantasies. At the same time I found myself under pressure to abandon the accompanying convictions that life is an adventure and that life is a contest. I was not, and am not, willing to do that.
Some people as they grow up become less. As children they have glorious ideas of who they are and of what life has for them. Thirty years later we find that they have settled for something grubby and inane. What accounts for the exchange of childhood aspiration to the adult anemia?
Other people as they grow up become more. Life is not an inevitable decline into dullness; for some it is an ascent into excellence. It was for Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived about sixty years. Across that life span there is no sign of decay or shriveling. Always he was pushing out the borders of reality, exploring new territory. And always he was vigorous in battle, challenging and contesting the shoddy, the false, the vile.
How did he do it? How do I do it? How do I shed the fantasies of boyhood and simultaneously increase my hold on the realities of life? How do I leave the childish yet keep the deeply accurate perceptions of the child—that life is an adventure, that life is a contest?
The book of Jeremiah begins with a personal name, Jeremiah. Seven more personal names follow: Hilkiah, Benjamin, Josiah, Amos, Judah, Jehoiakim, Zedekiah. The personal name is the most important part of speech in our language. The cluster of personal names that opens the book of Jeremiah strikes exactly the right note for what is most characteristic of Jeremiah: the personal in contrast to the stereotyped role, the individual in contrast to the blurred crowd, the unique spirit in contrast to generalized cultural moods. The book in which we find this most memorable record of what it means to be human in the fullest, most developed sense, begins with personal names.
Naming focuses the essential. The act of naming, an act that occurs early in everyone’s life, has enormous significance. We are named. From that sextant a life course is plotted on the oceans of reality in pursuit of righteousness. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has mined the meaning of naming: “The name is the state of speech in which we do not speak of people or things or values, but in which we speak to people, things, and values. . . . The name is the right address of a person under which he or she will respond. The original meaning of language was this very fact that it could be used to make people respond.”[2]
At our birth we are named, not numbered. The name is that part of speech by which we are recognized as a person: We are not classified as a species of animal. We are not labeled as a compound of chemicals. We are not assessed for our economic potential and given a cash value. We are named. What we are named is not as significant as that we are named.
Jeremiah’s impressive stature as a human being—Ewald calls him the “most human prophet”[3]—and the developing vitality of that humanness for sixty years have their source in his naming, along with the centered seriousness with which he took his name and the names of others. “To be called by his true name is part of any listener’s process of becoming his true self. We have to receive a name by others; this is part of the process of being fully born.”[4] Jeremiah was named and immersed in names. He was never reduced to a role or absorbed into a sociological trend or catapulted into a historical crisis. His identity and significance developed from the event of naming and his response to naming. The world of Jeremiah does not open with a description of the scenery or a sketch of the culture but with eight personal names.
Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that. In many areas of life the accurate transmission of our social security number is more important than the integrity with which we live. In many sectors of the economy the title that we hold is more important than our ability to do certain work. In many situations the public image that people have of us is more important than the personal relations that we develop with them. Every time that we go along with this movement from the personal to the impersonal, from the immediate to the remote, from the concrete to the abstract, we are diminished, we are less. Resistance is required if we will retain our humanity.
“It is a spiritual disaster,” warned Thomas Merton, “for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?”[5] But passport pictures, more likely than not, are preferred, even required, in most of our dealings in the world.
In preparing for travel to another continent I applied for a passport. I presented my birth certificate with the application. The clerk in the post office to whom I presented the document was a man I had known by name for nineteen years. He refused the application: I had not presented the original birth certificate but a photocopy. I brought in the original; that also was rejected; it had to be embossed. I wrote to the state in which I was born and purchased an embossed copy. All this time I was dealing with a person who knew my name and had observed my life in the community for nineteen years. That personal, firsthand knowledge was rejected in favor of an impersonal document.
I think that I can reconstruct the steps that result in such procedures. There is danger of foreign espionage. Our government has a responsibility for keeping our nation safe. It would be unreliable to depend on the personal loyalty and knowledge of a post office worker to determine identities. Insisting on an embossed birth certificate is a way of guarding against forgeries.
In my situation the procedure was not so much frustrating as amusing. But the incident itself, a minor inconvenience, is symptomatic of a major danger to our humanity: if I am frequently and authoritatively treated impersonally, I begin to think of myself the same way. I consider myself in terms of how I fit into the statistical norms; I evaluate myself in terms of my usefulness; I assess my worth in response to how much others want me or don’t want me. In the process of going along with such procedures I find myself defined by a label, squeezed into a role, functioning at the level of my social security number. It requires assertive, lifelong effort to keep our names in front. Our names are far more important than trends in the economy, far more important than crises in the cities, far more important than breakthroughs in space travel. For a name addresses the uniquely human creature. A name recognizes that I am this person and not another.
No one can assess my significance by looking at the work that I do. No one can determine my worth by deciding the salary they will pay me. No one can know what is going on in my mind by examining my school transcripts. No one can know me by measuring me or weighing me or analyzing me. Call my name.
Names not only address what we are, the irreplaceably human, they also anticipate what we become. Names call us to become who we will be. A lifetime of growth and development is announced by a name. Names mean something. A personal name designates what is irreducibly personal; it also calls us to become what we are not yet.
The meaning of a name is not discovered through scholarly etymology or through meditative introspection. It is not validated by bureaucratic approval. And it certainly is not worked up through the vanity of public relations. The meaning of a name is not in the dictionary, not in the unconscious, not in the size of the lettering. It is in relationship—with God. It was the Jeremiah “to whom the word of the LORD came” who realized his authentic and eternal being.
Naming is a way of hoping. We name a child after someone or some quality that we hope he or she will become—a saint, a hero, an admired ancestor. Some parents name their children trivially after movie stars and millionaires. Harmless? Cute? But we do have a way of taking on the identities that are prescribed for us. Millions live out the superficial sham of the entertainer and the greedy exploitiveness of the millionaire because, in part, significant people in their lives cast them in a role or fantasized an illusion and failed to hope a human future for them.
When I take an infant into my arms at the baptismal font and ask the parents, “What is the Christian name of this child?” I am not only asking, “Who is this child I am holding?” but also, “What do you want this child to become? What are your visions for this life?” George Herbert knew the evocative power of naming when he instructed his fellow pastors in sixteenth-century England that at baptism they “admit no vain or idle names.”[6]
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is the region created by novelist William Faulkner to show the spiritual and moral condition of life in our times. An examination of the men and women who live there is a powerful incentive to the imagination to realize both the comic and tragic aspects of what is going on among us as we make it (or don’t make it) through life. One of the children is named Montgomery Ward. Montgomery Ward Snopes.[7] It is the perfect name for the child being trained to be a successful consumer. If you want your child to grow up getting and spending, using available leisure in the shopping malls, proving virility by getting things, that is the right name: Montgomery Ward Snopes, patron saint of the person for whom the ritual of shopping is the new worship, the department store the new cathedral, and the advertising page the infallible Scripture.
One of the supreme tasks of the faith community is to announce to us early and clearly the kind of life into which we can grow, to help us set our sights on what it means to be a human being complete. Not one of us, at this moment, is complete. In another hour, another day, we will have changed. We are in process of becoming either less or more. There are a million chemical and electrical interchanges going on in each of us this very moment. There are intricate moral decisions and spiritual transactions taking place. What are we becoming? Less or more?
John, writing to an early community of Christians, said, “But friends, that’s exactly who we are: children of God. And that’s only the beginning. Who knows how we’ll end up! What we know is that when Christ is openly revealed, we’ll see him—and in seeing him, become like him” (1 Jn 3:2). We are children; we will be adults. We don’t yet see the results of what we are becoming, but we know the goal, to be like Christ, or, in Paul’s words, to arrive at being “fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ” (Eph 4:13). We do not deteriorate. We do not disintegrate. We become.
William Stafford was once asked in an interview, “When did you decide to be a poet?” He responded that the question was put wrongly: everyone is born a poet—a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing, he said, what everyone starts out doing. “The real question is why did the other people stop?”[8]
Jeremiah kept on doing what everybody starts out doing, being human. And he didn’t stop. For sixty years and more he continued to live into the meaning of his name. The exact meaning of Jeremiah is not certain: it may mean “the LORD exalts”; it may mean “the LORD hurls.” What is certain is that “the LORD,” the personal name of God, is in his name.
On the day that their son was born, Hilkiah and his wife named him in anticipation of the way that God would act in his life. In hope they saw the years unfolding and their son as one in whom the Lord would be lifted up: Jeremiah—the LORD is exalted. Or, in hope they saw into the future and anticipated their son as a person whom God would hurl into the community as a javelin-representative of God, penetrating the defenses of selfishness with divine judgment and mercy: Jeremiah—the LORD hurls. Either way, it is clear that God is in the name. Jeremiah’s life was compounded with God’s action. Jeremiah’s parents saw their child as a region of being in which the human and divine would integrate. The life of God in some way or other (exalting? hurling?) would find expression in this child of theirs. Naming is not a whim; it is a lever of hope against the future. And the “hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality” (Cardinal L. J. Suenens).
No child is just a child. Each is a creature in whom God intends to do something glorious and great. No one is only a product of the genes contributed by parents. Who we are and will be is compounded with who God is and what he does. God’s love and providence and salvation are comprised in the reality of our existence along with our metabolism and blood type and fingerprints.
Most names throughout Israel’s history were compounded with the name of God. The names anticipated what each would be when he, when she, grew up. Josiah, God heals; Jehoiakim, the Lord raises up; Zedekiah, the Lord is righteous; Jeremiah, the Lord exalts, or the Lord hurls. Some of these people lived out the meaning of their names. Jeremiah and Josiah did. Others, like Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, were an embarrassment to their names, parodying with their lives the great promise of their names. Zedekiah had a glorious name; he betrayed it. Jehoiakim had a superb name; he abandoned it.
There were at least three categories into which Jeremiah could have quietly slipped, taking his place among the religious professionals of his day: prophet, priest or wise man. These were the accepted roles for persons who had concern for the things of God and the ways of humanity. Jeremiah’s refusal to accept any of the available roles and his eccentric insistence on living out the identity of his name put him in conspicuous contrast to the eroded smoothness of those who were shaped by the expectations of popular opinion and who gathered content for their messages not by asking “What is there to eat?” but “What will Jones swallow?” His angular integrity exposed the shallow complacencies in which they lived. They were provoked and then enraged: “Come on, let’s cook up a plot against Jeremiah. We’ll still have the priests to teach us the law, wise counselors to give us advice, and prophets to tell us what God has to say. Come on, let’s discredit him so we don’t have to put up with him any longer” (Jer 18:18). Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah’s singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their “law” and “counsel” and “words” were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah’s honest and passionate life.
The French talk of a deformation professionelle—a liability, a tendency to defect, that is inherent in the role one has assumed as say, a physician or a lawyer. The deformation to which prophets and priests and wise men are subject is to market God as a commodity, to use God to legitimize selfishness. It is easy and it is frequent. It happens without deliberate intent.
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away.[9]
A personal name, not an assigned role, is our passbook into reality. It is also our continuing orientation in reality. Anything other than our name—title, job description, number, role—is less than a name. Apart from the name that marks us as uniquely created and personally addressed, we slide into fantasies that are out of touch with the world as it is and so we live ineffectively, irresponsibly. Or we live by the stereotypes in which other people cast us that are out of touch with the uniqueness in which God has created us, and so live diminished into boredom, the brightness leaking away.
Jeremiah—a name linked with the name and action of God. The only thing more significant to Jeremiah than his own being was God’s being. He fought in the name of the Lord and explored the reality of God and in the process grew and developed, ripened and matured. He was always reaching out, always finding more truth, getting in touch with more of God, becoming more himself, more human.