There is so much more to say than has already been said on reading Jeremiah in the abuse crisis. Earlier this month, I started with the end. Jeremiah more than once decides on whether to stay or go as the Babylonian crisis invades, captures, and reconfigures Judah. Now, this weekend, for each Latin Catholic[1] the prophet himself is unavoidable. He is pushing his way into the readings at Mass.

The first reading for the Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, gives further background—and disturbing emotional force—to Jeremiah’s relevance for our time:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” (Jer 23:1–6 NRSV)

This text is almost too full. The beginning has a raw power, and the end sets out a contrast that is hard to ignore. Everything is bursting at the seams with the entirety of the pent-up energy of the Book of Jeremiah itself—all the meaning for the original context, all the literary allusions to other parts of the book. And it is as if already in labour pains for birth into our own time today. It would just be impossible to capture everything. You’d have to study the whole prophetic book, and read it prayerfully for our own situation, to even begin to scratch the surface. Of course, I encourage precision that. But rather than leave everything hanging loose and open, I think that some meditations and products of commentary-informed lectio divina could be useful, even if insufficient.

Causes of the crisis

Establishing the context for Jeremiah’s proclamation of woe is not straightforward. Obviously the general locus on interpretation is the Kingdom of Judah in the run-up to the Babylonian crisis. But beyond that, I don’t think we can say much.

Unlike the narrative chapters that I focused on regarding the question of should I stay or should I go, with the hinge-like dependence on the central figure of Gedaliah (and positive and negative reactions to him), earlier chapters of Jeremiah are all over the place chronologically. For example, in chapter 22, we have oracles against Shallum (a.k.a. Jehoahaz; v. 11), Jehoiakim (v. 18), and Coniah (a.k.a. Jehoiachin, Jeconiah; v. 24). Three different kings, three different times. Without any explicit specification regarding the pronouncement in chapter 23, we can’t say who exactly Jeremiah has in mind or when the words were delivered.

The sense one is left with, then, is a general one. And that’s just as well for some spiritual reading. This text has a power of its own: “Woe to the shepherds!”

But why? What in the world have the shepherds of the Lord’s people done? It’s not exactly helpful for our personal devotion to just think about them as regular sinners. Everybody sins. And that’s hardly going to be specific to the task of reading Jeremiah in the abuse crisis.

The causes of course are complex. As I insisted in the first article in this series, Jeremiah considers the Babylonian crisis to be universal. It takes in Judah proper. But it also ravages Ammon, Egypt, Gaza, Moab, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, and Elam—all of which have salient characteristics that are very intriguing for spiritual reading today. So in one sense, nothing that Judah’s ruling and priestly classes did can explain the totality of the Babylonian drama. There is simply a force of nature, a social force that emerges from human development and history, that makes itself known and reconfigures the geopolitical landscape.

But at the same time, Jeremiah insists that the ruling and priestly classes of the Lord’s people are to blame. There are numerous reasons given throughout the entire prophetic book (and indeed in related narratives, like 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles). While none of these should be forgotten for a complete understanding of the original message and its polyphonic interpretation and application today, I want to draw out some reference points that I think especially fruitful and dynamic in our contemporary situation.

Sacrifice of the children

One of Jeremiah’s prophecies is inevitable here. We can’t forget it, nor diminish its terrifying impact, nor its contemporary shadows. That would be simply unacceptable. The prophet is told:

Thus said the Lord: Go and buy a potter’s earthenware jug. Take with you some of the elders of the people and some of the senior priests, and go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom at the entry of the Potsherd Gate, and proclaim there the words that I tell you. You shall say: Hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I am going to bring such disaster upon this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah have known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and gone on building the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind, therefore the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth or the valley of the son of Hinnom but the valley of Slaughter. And in this place I will make void the plans of Judah and Jerusalem and will make them fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their life. I will give their dead bodies for food to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth. And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at; everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its disasters. And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbours in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them. (Jer 19:1–9 NRSV)

Jeremiah goes to a specific place, the valley of Hinnom. There, he denounces some generalized sins of the people, alongside a very specific sin that has to do with the place itself. In that valley, people would “burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I [the Lord] did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind.” And in response to this horrible thing they have done to their own children, punishment will fall on them that echoes it: when the crisis envelops the city and they are starving for food, the people will “eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters.”

This is horrifying and deplorable in the extreme. But let’s not be too hasty in condemning and putting ourselves at a distance. Have we or the leaders or the Lord’s people not sacrificed children to some end as well? Because we let that happen, did we not end up consuming the lives of children ourselves? If not us exactly, as if we are active agents, then how about the ecclesial community or the ecclesiastical institution? If we cannot find echoes of the same patterns in the abuse crisis—though abuse extends far beyond the abuse of children alone—then I don’t know if we’re doing lectio divina at all.

A litany of abuses

What is done to the children deserves special mention—both in Jeremiah and for ourselves, for our own reflection and tears of repentance and conversion. But that isn’t all. Jeremiah is replete with condemnations of sins done by the ruling and religious classes against the common people. Special mention, however, should go out to returning people to slavery (Jer 34:8–22) and the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse that the prophet himself is subjected to in his imprisonment (Jer 37–39). It’s simply impossible to cover all this, and the whole book deserves meditation for context. For Jeremiah, the crisis encompasses a litany of evil—and corruption, justification of sin, hollowing out a space for it, manipulation of truth for its sake and the “right” to not recognize one’s sinfulness.

“Shalom, shalom”—when no shalom

If we return to Jeremiah 23, but read a little further along than today’s Mass reading, we’ll find something else that, I think, should jump right off the page. In the midst of several poetic passages, there is this nugget of prose:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they are deluding you. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They keep saying to those who despise the word of the Lord, “It shall be well with you”; and to all who stubbornly follow their own stubborn hearts, they say, “No calamity shall come upon you.” (Jer 23:16–17 NRSV)

Here we have an allusion to two earlier, better-known passages:

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
    saying, “Peace, peace,”
    when there is no peace. (Jer 6:14 = 8:11 NRSV)

Or, in an alternative translation:

They offer healing offhand
For the wounds of My poor people,
Saying, “All is well, all is well,”
When nothing is well. (Jer 6:14 = 8:11 NJPS)

In Hebrew, this text is more precisely, “shalom, shalom, when no shalom.” The words “there is” in the NRSV are inserted to give meaning in English, while the phrasing of the NJPS avoids the issue by translating “shalom” differently. This term means both “peace” and the claim that “all is well,” as reflected in the different translations. So, what Jeremiah decries is the practice of wishing shalom to someone, or declaring that shalom is present, when the speaker either/neither has the intention of acting with shalom and/or that shalom is not the prevailing factual state of affairs. It’s a lie of the will or the mind. Either way, it’s falsehood. It’s corruption.

This is what false prophets look like during Jeremiah’s crisis. They simply say all is well, or wish it with a double heart, when it clearly isn’t. Triumphant words crash with reality. The crisis is actually upon us.

It rather seems to me that “shalom, shalom, when no shalom” is a commonplace in our world today. It might occur if perchance, we say, “The closeness of the church to victims is clear.” But maybe we offer instead views in which the need for abuse victims to remove themselves from the perpetrators’ power is simply ignored and never spoken of. Or alternatively, we speak over someone else’s intimate experience of suffering. Even survivors themselves might falter on some of these points—though surely less than those enveloped in a protective covering by the institution (not denying, of course, the potential overlap between the two groups).

Destruction of witness and prophetic testimony

There is another passage in Jeremiah that I can’t get out of my head as I meditate on the woe proclaimed to the shepherds. It comes from the back-end narrative chapters involved in the Gedaliah saga. At one point, Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch has succeeded in having a scroll of the prophet’s teaching admitted to the court of the scribes. Upon hearing from Baruch, they are moved. They respond by first getting him to safety. Then they approach King Jehoiakim himself, with Jehudi, who is either one of their number or someone close to their company, carrying the prophetic scroll itself. The story continues as follows:

Now the king was sitting in his winter apartment (it was the ninth month [i.e., December]), and there was a fire burning in the brazier before him. As Jehudi read three or four columns, he would cut them off with a penknife and throw them into the fire in the brazier, until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier. Yet neither the king nor any of his servants who heard all these words was alarmed, nor did they tear their garments. Even when [the scribes and officials] Elnathan and Delaiah and Gemariah urged the king not to burn the scroll, he would not listen to them. (Jer 36:22–25 NRSV)

If we picture this scene and all its characters in our mind, we’ll come away with a good deal of meditative material. It’s cold. The king, like Peter (cf. Jn 18:18), is warming himself by the fire. He listens to the witness to the truth with complete impassivity. With all the good manners of corruption, Jehoiakim holds his tongue and just politely grabs a knife—or worse, has Jehudi grab a knife—and slices off the truth and tosses into the fire to be useful on a December day. Officials are outraged, but they are reduced to silence. The casualness of erasure wins the day. Its practicality lights the shadowy room.

What we are reading is the story of a victim making a complaint or a whistleblower. It’s the tale of a culture—not just of denial and shaming, as when someone says “shalom, shalom,” when no shalom—but of silencing and cover-up.

We have not yet dealt with the fact that telling the truth to authorities in the Church, or even family or friends, is often said to be even more traumatizing that the initial event. That is damning in the extreme. How impassively do we see someone cut up the scrolls in our lives and toss them into the fire? Have we done the same at any time? Has it been done to us? Do we feel the pain from the inside?

It is hard not to linger for a moment here on some words of Pope Francis:

The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced. But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity by falling into complicity. The Lord heard that cry and once again showed us on which side he stands. (Letter to the People of God 1)

But how many times, over and over again, does Jehoiakim impassively chop up and burn the scroll? In how many places? In how many hearts and communities?

“I myself will shepherd them”

It’s a hellscape society. The shepherds themselves are the ones “who have scattered [the Lord’s] flock and have driven them away,” and to add a further layer to this, the shepherds are said to “have not attended to [the sheep]” (Jer 23:2 NRSV). In response, it is the Lord himself who

will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. (vv. 3–4 NRSV)

Indeed:

I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” (vv. 5–6 NRSV)

God will be the shepherd. For those who have been left bereft, abandoned, smashed into a wall or a fence, trampled on, and shoved out the gate—God himself will shepherd them. God will, and the One whom he sends. The whole Trinity, we can say, will shepherd them. Not just them, but the tender Humanity of the Sent One, of the Lord’s Righteousness.

This adds plenty of meaning to Jeremiah’s injunction to remain in the land. Don’t go to Ammon, those who squat on the land but worship power, nor to Egypt, those who think they are above the crisis and its tide. Just remain. God will be with you. If you flee, the crisis will overtake you there where you go, too—whether among the aggressive people who have squatted on the land and mimicked its truth, or the great power of the world that thinks itself above it all, or in its colonies, or other religious nations over whom God will weep, or any memory of an unashamed past, or the domains or structures of education and wisdom, or the unaffiliated wanderers, or in any corner of the earth. The crisis will consume everything. So Jeremiah implores his people to remain. At least in the land—the land itself, not the squatted-on land or another place outside—there is the presence that we need.

It’s not easy, by far. The shepherds themselves drive people away—much like the actions of Ishmael and the Ammonites, in the final narrative chapters of Jeremiah, drive Johanan and the people to Egypt. There are pressures from multiple sides. And the leadership can be utterly perverse.

But Jeremiah believes that, in this barrenness, God will shepherd his people. When no one else steps up, the Lord does. Not only will he shepherd them when they heed the injunction to stay. He will seek them out where they have wandered to and bring them back to the land—and shepherd them there.

Such a belief was hard-won. It did not come easily to Jeremiah. Oh no. He struggled with God tooth and nail on this. An earlier passage in the book, part of which will be familiar to those who pray the office of Compline, illustrates this well:

Although our iniquities testify against us,
    act, O Lord, for your name’s sake;
our rebellions indeed are many,
    and we have sinned against you.
O hope of Israel,
    its savior in time of trouble,
why should you be like a stranger in the land,
    like a traveler turning aside for the night?
Why should you be like someone confused,
    like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?
Yet you, O Lord, are in the midst of us,
    and we are called by your name;
    do not forsake us! (Jer 14:7–9 NRSV)

Without full context, one might interpret the last verse as confident and assured (and perhaps that is how we have been praying it at Compline). But a different picture is painted by the preceding questions and reasons given for why God may give up on us. Indeed, Jeremiah adds:

Have you completely rejected Judah?
    Does your heart loathe Zion?
Why have you struck us down
    so that there is no healing for us?
We look for peace, but find no good;
    for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.
We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord,
    the iniquity of our ancestors,
    for we have sinned against you.
Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake;
    do not dishonor your glorious throne;
    remember and do not break your covenant with us. (Jer 14:19–21 NRSV)

Jeremiah is being straightforward with God about his anguish and doubts, as he often is. He asks with total genuineness if this is the end. Then he implores the Lord that it is not. It is not simplistic for him to suggest that, if we just remain in the land, the Lord will supply what the shepherds do not. This is not natural for him. He knows the cost.

And therein, I think, lies the challenge for all of us. Even if the woes to the shepherds do not make us look into our own actions, for we have been on one side of the events that lead to the crisis, Jeremiah testifies, without denying any of the horror of what is happening, to a simple trust that wins out: “I myself will gather and shepherd them.”

I experience this as something to believe—and to ask the Lord for help with the remnants of my unbelief.

Image in header: Detail of Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem by Horace Vernet, 1844 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

[1] Well, most of us anyway. While in Greece, I recently learned that Latin Rite Catholics there follow the Julian calendar to remain closer with the Orthodox majority.